Dance Magers

God bless the booty video trend. Like any overwhelmed observer of popular music, I've had my moments of doubt about an aesthetic that more and more resembles those high-end porn videos for people who don't actually like porn. Those are the ones where the producers spend a bunch of money on saxophone music and a RED camera to make sure you don't feel gross about jerking off. You're not fooling anyone with your fancy lighting setups and fast-fashion knockoff wardrobe choices, guys. Still, there's a reason the booty genre has endured decades of music industry turmoil. The videos are great, and people love them. More vitally for our female music icons, it's a clear, surefire way to assert your relevance, no matter how old you are.

The clip for Jennifer Lopez's "Booty" remix that came out last week is yet another entry in the competition for filthiest music video of 2014. It excises the over-the-top, comical gyrations, garish set design, and knowing sense of humor of Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda" video and replaces that with a rapid-fire succession of butts doing things most butts can't do. Yes, it found a way to be even less subtle than "Anaconda."

Also, this is the first time I've considered Jennifer Lopez sexy since 2005, which is no small feat when discussing the star of Monster-in-Law and The Wedding Planner. "Booty" has enough people talking (or not talking, depending how much they like the video's ample eroticism) that Lopez probably just punched her ticket off the music industry senior tour. The ass-centric, porny spank video is now the go-to career move for legacy pop stars like J-Lo who want an instant hot relevancy injection. 

I know I'm basically being manipulated by these videos—duped into believing I'm seeing something edgy solely for the purposes of getting me to care about the song that's tangentially related to the sex. In this case, the ruse worked, since if I had just heard the song on its own, I probably would tweet something snarky and forget about it forever (or at least until I'm doing commentary on the "Where Are They Now" segment of I Love the 2010s on VH1 Classic). The track that inspired the video is pretty unremarkable, modern pop music, but after years of dodgy film performances and captaining the flaming Hindenberg known as American Idol, it's more than a bit shocking to see J-Lo having oil poured all over her ass for my enjoyment. "Booty" director Hype Williams has been trading in titillation since before I could drive a car, but sexuality in videos has evolved greatly since Williams' heyday.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the sexual performance in music videos happened mostly in the rear (pun intended, obviously. I'm a pro, guys). Anonymous background dancers would grind and shake for the appreciation of both the stars of the video (usually male) and the audience simultaneously. One of Hype Williams' most well-known videos is Jay Z's "Big Pimpin," a clip that—along with Paul Hunter's video for Notorious B.I.G.'s "Hypnotize"—defines the classic "rich black men on a boat" genre. In that video, Jay and UGK are surrounded by hot women in an exotic location. The ladies dance for our amusement while the guys pop bottles, smoke phallic cigars, and throw money around. This is the template for any great hip-hop video, but has fallen out of favor in a climate where labels don't let you blow $200,000 on what is essentially a super entertaining commercial anymore. Today's videos lean on superhuman sexuality because they can't afford to toss $100 bills off the side of a yacht, send a film crew to Trinidad, and blow up Lamborghinis anymore.

When female hip-hop and R&B artists made videos in the last two decades, the focus of the sexuality was often wildly different from their male counterparts. Another Paul Hunter video from that era, Mariah Carey's "Honey," features Mariah stripping down to a bathing suit, getting very wet from a dip in the ocean, and fronting a tame, almost corny dance routine inside yet another yacht. Her backup dancers are dressed like sailors, because they're on a boat. What else would they be dressed as? Cossacks? Chinese railroad workers? Power Rangers? Hunter was also the guy who put Missy Elliot inside a garbage bag for the video for "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)." What we have now is Nicki, J-Lo, Iggy, and others filling that traditional backup dancer role of shaking their ass, but with no guys around to smoke cigars.

The booty video genre is kind of a victory for the backup dancers of the world, in that their abilities and unique talents are an important part of making a pop star successful. These videos aren't just a vehicle to promote a song. They're also their own form of performance spectacle. I'm not sure this is even possible, but if one were to be able to remove the sensuality from "Booty," the viewer could still marvel at Lopez's immaculate fitness level. She is flexible in a way that a 45-year-old should not be. Beyond the obvious sexuality factor, the booty video' allows the pop star to reassert vitality, to triumphantly declare, "I am not old!"

What we are looking at in "Booty" is a marvel of human ingenuity, and a symbol of what we can do with the human form if all we make it do is drink sparkling water, eat rice cakes, exercise, and judge talent shows. J-Lo's trainer should be eligible for some kind of Lifetime Achievement Award at the next VMAs, or at the very least, a gift certificate for Bath and Body Works. Just a little something to say thank you. We now know that Jennifer Lopez is in better shape than the whole world, which has become the number one prerequisite for musical success if you are a woman. Good luck living up to that standard, gals.

Of course, it shouldn't have to be that way. It just is. If you are a female singer past the age of 40, the market is constantly trying to turn you into metaphorical glue and repurpose you for a humiliating reality show about your precipitous decline in fortune instead of continuing to let you, you know, make music. Mariah Carey's last music video—a far cry from the glory days of "Honey"—came and went, and was notable for us never seeing a single clear shot of her body. She sits down backwards in a chair like a "cool" substitute teacher or covers herself with her arms for most of the video. Whether we like it or not, that's abdicating the throne in a pop climate where Miley Cyrus simulates fellatio as her opener. Mariah Carey is only a year younger than Jennifer Lopez (44 rather than 45), but didn't even come close to declaring her power the way J-Lo did.

For fun, I googled "Ashanti," a singer who blew up around the same time as J-Lo, but is 12 years younger than her. The first news article that came up was a piece on BuzzFeed called "Why You Should Still Care About Ashanti." In it, the author details Ashanti's early success, departure from Irv Gotti's Murder Inc. record label, her relationship with Nelly, and her comeback album, Braveheart. From the quotes and photos, Ashanti seems creatively fulfilled and healthy. Braveheart only sold 28,000 copies in its first week of release, barely squeaking into the top ten on the Billboard charts.

In February of this year, a video for a track from Braveheart called "I Got It" was released. It's a garish throwback with random shots of hot sports cars, a tough guy rapper looking tough (substitute Ja Rule with Rick Ross), and Ashanti alternating between sexy and intransigent poses. It's full of signifiers of wealth that are almost quaint—champagne, lapdances, fur coats, and gold chains—when compared to whatever wearable future tech I'm supposed to buy this Christmas. It's basically an HD version of a Blackstreet video up to around the 2:30 mark, when we see a man who may or may not be a Ja Rule impersonator tied to a chair. Ashanti pours a bottle of expensive liquor on his head, then grinds up on him for no reason.

I'm sure she expended a lot of energy on this video, but the last thing I thought was, "Wow, Ashanti looks really hot." I mean, she's in great shape and looks amazing, but it feels like so much posturing. I can't even properly articulate why I didn't care. I just didn't. I do know that Ashanti was never "sexy" to begin with. Her appeal came from being a sweet girl in the midst of a courtship with a guy from the "wrong side of the tracks," which was a posture Jennifer Lopez was more than happy to assume back in 2001. Despite coming out six months before the "Anaconda" video, I don't think anyone is calling the "I Got It" video a feminist statement. It didn't even make a dent on the culture. Despite her best efforts to embrace the new sexuality, Ashanti got old. 

Before she released "Booty," Jennifer Lopez was in real danger of going the Ashanti/Mariah Carey route. Of her peer group, she's the one who seemingly got left behind in the nursing home from Cocoon. Beyoncé is the powerful, vital media mogul. Justin Timberlake got the respectable acting career. Britney Spears is the living, breathing waxwork figure raking in millions of dollars a year doing Vegas pantomime. Christina Aguilera was on a talent show people still care about. 

As a film star, J-Lo never quite lived up to the promise of Selena and Out of Sight, nor did she go full-time as a pop star, so a new project from her is often met with the sort of muted interest more often associated with a new NCIS spinoff or State of the Union address. We know what we're going to get, it's not going to be that great, but we pay attention because. Her latest album, A.K.A., sold a modest 33,000 copies in its first week of release. American Idol somehow gets duller with every passing season. With relevance slowly slipping through her fingers, Jennifer Lopez did the one thing any female pop star in need of a popularity resurgence can do: She made a booty video. A really porny booty video with Iggy Azalea and implied sapphic bliss.

These videos, when done well, serve a purpose in the pop universe. I am not ashamed to say I can be marketed to with sex, which is why I love the transparent appeal of the booty video. Before, I wasn't interested in anything J-Lo did, and now... well I'm only slightly embarrassed to say I'll pay attention to everything she does. Maybe a bit too much. The travesty known as "The Fappening" revealed that actresses, pop stars, and models have been so sexualized by the inescapable nature of their professions (and the accompanying need to stay young) that our prurient interest in their bodies has destroyed any remnant of privacy they had left. The audience can say, "sorry, not hot enough" to Ashanti or Mariah Carey through their apathy, but if Jennifer Lopez gets an Astroglide shower, she gets to be important again. 

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

Screenshot of the Aurora shooter at a hearing via YouTube

On July 20, 2012, a man stood up from his seat in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, that was showing a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises and opened fire on the audience. In the ensuing violence, 12 people were killed and 70 were injured. The shooter’s motive has never been clear—the suspect told police he was the Joker after they took him into custody—but as is usually the case with the perpetrators of mass killings, he’s since been the subject of a lot of media attention and speculation in the 26 months since the incident.

So it’s not surprising that cable channel TruTV (formally Court TV), six local television channels, and a Denver radio station have petitioned Arapahoe County district court chief Carlos Samour to allow cameras in his courtroom when the trial starts in December. But Lonnie and Sandy Phillips, the parents of 24-year-old shooting victim Jessica Ghawi, say that putting the proceedings on TV will give the killer too much attention. 

“It doesn’t do the families, who should be the focus, any good at all. It just brings up constant, constant pain,” Sandy told me. “It’s going to be bad enough sitting in the courtroom hearing the things we need to hear and seeing the things we need to see, but for everybody in America to be seeing it too, it’s just too much.”

The defense attorney and prosecutors have also asked for cameras to be banned in the courtroom, as have some other family members of victims, including Caren and Tom Teves (parents of Alex Teves) and Anita Busch (a cousin of Micayla Medek). Last week, Busch published an op-ed in the Denver Post asking that cameras be kept away from the trial.

“Behind the scenes, the families of the deceased and injured in Aurora have already had to deal with additional trauma from harassment related to the case,” she wrote. “Having cameras in the courtroom to broadcast these images across the globe and give notoriety to the monster accused of this crime will give rise to emotionally overwhelming incidents and on a much greater scale.”

While talking with the Phillips family, I noticed that Lonnie and Sandy weren’t using the name of the Aurora shooter (which I have decided not to include in this article). “I never use his name,” said Sandy. “When media does use his name, when they do use his picture, they’re giving him the very thing that he sought out.”

Criminals have always been a source of fascination for the public. In the pre-television era, killers like Billy the Kid and thieves like Bonnie and Cylde were turned into the stuff of legend through newspaper accounts and songs. Naturally, it didn’t take long after the widespread adoption of television for the new medium to work its way into courtrooms.

The first murder trial to allow cameras was that of Jack Gilbert Graham, who in 1955 blew up a plane flying from Denver to Portland, Oregon, by hiding a bomb in his mother’s suitcase, killing all 44 people on board. The media scrum around him was such that before the trial, local radio station Gene Amole and a Rocky Mountain News photographer snuck a camera into Denver County Jail to interview Graham (though no Denver TV station would air the footage). 

Serial killer Ted Bundy’s 1979 trial was the first to be nationally televised, and in 1981 the Supreme Court ruled that states could allow criminal proceedings to be photographed and filmed. The 90s were a sort of golden age for televised trials: Dozens of news organizations from all over the world were there to show viewers Jeffrey Dahmer being found guilty of murder in 1992, and millions tuned into Court TV the next year to watch the trial of the Menendez brothers, who killed their wealthy parents with a shotgun.

Then there was the O. J. Simpson trial. Judge Lance Ito allowed cameras into his courtroom and reportedly became so taken with the publicity that he’d watch himself on TV at home. By then, it was clear that people loved watching murder trials.

In 2011, a million people tuned into a CNN livestream to watch a judge pronounce Casey Anthony not guilty of murdering her daughter. A couple years later, in 2013, Ohio school shooter T. J. Lane wore a shirt that said “KILLER” to his televised sentencing hearing and told the victims’ families, “The hand that pulls the trigger that killed your sons now masturbates to the memory. Fuck all of you.” That moment resulted in predictable shock and outrage, but also got turned into a GIF. You can’t help but wonder if a reaction like that—and attention like that—is exactly what Lane wanted.

That’s not to say that all murder trials, even all murder trials with a media-friendly hook, get covered like Anthony’s or Lane’s.

“As far as what cases get picked up by the media, it’s always been a difficult thing for me to even predict,” said Douglas Richards, a Denver criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor. “I remember as a prosecutor years ago I would handle all these murder cases and the cases just seemed so heart-wrenching to me and I couldn’t figure out why Tom Brokaw or Brian Williams wasn’t right there covering the case.”

It’s easy, in the case of the Aurora shooting trial, to see why people are interested—a tragic and bizarre crime, a defendant who seems insane and hasn’t shown any remorse, even a link to a Hollywood film. Ultimately, however, the level of access the press has will be determined by Judge Samour, who Lonnie Phillips says will make his decision in the next few days.

“You have to get permission from the court and it’s up to the individual judge to decide whether or not to have that in the courtroom,” said Richards. “The judge will decide where the cameras will be put, what proceedings will be broadcast.”

In 2012, the Denver Post defended allowing cameras in courtrooms in high-profile trials like that of the Aurora shooter, arguing that the public has a right to know what’s going on when a case has become a major news story.

But while Sandy Phillips doesn’t hate the media, she’s wary of so much interest in the trial of the man charged with killing her daughter.

“I don’t think anybody does anything to intentionally hurt us. They are doing their job. They are covering the story,” she said. “But when they get away from the human side of the story, and it becomes sensationalism, that’s when it’s dangerous.”

She worries about the message it sends to the mass murderer who took her daughter’s life, and also the message it sends to future perpetrators of such crimes.

“We all know that on some level that this is part of the plan of the killer—to have that fame and glory, and that’s what is scary.”

Gina Tron is a freelance writer and author of a memoir, You’re Fine. Follow her on Twitter.

All images courtesy of AssMatrix

Way before Vogue proclaimed their arrogant love for ass in an article entitled, ‘We’re Officially in the Era of the Big Booty,’ a niche site named AssMatrix.com was in a corner of the internet quietly worshiping the derrière. While the fashion bible would have you believe it, white people did not discover ass. Many cultures have long been butt-obsessed, and the crew over at AssMatrix.com is part of that—they’re a collective of people from all over the world held together by their love for the posterior, and going to insanely nerdy lengths to analyze it, and to further educate the masses on asses.

The website was founded at the dawn of the 2000s, and it doesn’t appear that the format’s been updated since. It’s stacked with content (pages upon pages of blog posts ranging from titles like “Do you like Ghetto Booties or Lard Asses!” to “Poon Blockage”—honestly, I can’t make this shit up) set to the tune of an autoplaying song that sounds like it should be heard in a boxing ring. They even throw some history with posts that cite the roots of booty from Venus Hottentot to Victorian buttresses. Some pages are long form rants on serious ass-related topics with names like “THE SINGULARITY: Booties becoming “1,” while others use elaborate diagrams and analysis to deconstruct videos featuring butts with the sort of obsessive attention to detail as if they were examining the Zapruder footage. The result is an awkward cross between MTO and some dude’s 9/11 conspiracy site, that’s firmly rooted in everyone’s love for ass.

Over the years, they’ve had thousands of submissions to their “Send Ur Pics” section where people can submit photos of their own butts to be analyzed by the AssMatrix.com team. You really don’t understand how oddly knowledgeable they are about this shit until you see these chicks’ photos with their butts sectioned off with dotted lines and circles to point out the “booty meat.” The whole thing is so full of dedicated, worshipful nerdery you’d almost forget that the site is just a wee bit reductive and objectifying. Almost. I had the chance to chat with one of the ass analysts to clear the air about booty appreciation. To protect the integrity of their analysis and anonymity, they asked that we refer to them as a collective. It turned into the most lengthy, intellectual conversation about ass that I’ve ever experienced.

VICE: Can you tell me a bit about each of the classifications of ass that your site uses?
AssMatrix.com: So we start off with what, in my opinion, is the best. But I’m coming from the more athletic field and we tend to like more like roundish, ball-looking-type things. So that would be the "AppleBottom." But obviously it’s not for everybody—they don’t like the perkiness of it, they don’t like the top of it, it’s so round on the bottom. It might be too much of a woman for some guys. It’s just too much for them to deal with right now.

The overwhelming majority loves the "Teardrop." And that’s characterized by the slope to the top with a nice, round bottom. So where you might have a hard curvature coming right off the back or just be shelf-like like the AppleBottom, you have a slope going on when you’re talking about the Teardrop. People like that, it looks like aerodynamic, it looks great in dresses. But you’re putting on dresses that jack it up and make it look like "AppleBottom."

So then we move on to the "Pigtail". This is more or less like it’s a development under the body. Everyone thinks they have "AppleBottom" or "Teardrop," but then when they find out they don’t, they get very pissed off. So it doesn’t have too much crack to it, it doesn’t have much curve. It’s pretty much just a little bit of fat dropping under the body. But it does tend to have a bit of a feature to it like an "Ass Smile."

Now, the "Ass Smile" you can get on any booty. It basically looks very bulbous, very curved, and then it extends up the middle and there’s the definition at the very bottom of the butt. Even if you’re like a tiny thing, you still like an ass with an "Ass Smile." It’s not really a class as much as a feature, but some people don’t have anything but that.

Then you have the last category, which is the "GhettoBooty." So everybody in the hood and people in Africa and people who just like a lot of size, they love that. People think big means better and that’s not true. It’s that big, round thing, it looks like a huge extension to the "AppleBottom." So it’s really a huge "AppleBottom" or a "Teardrop." Now, everyone’s paying to get injections, transplants of fat. So that used to be very prize back in the day, but now it’s all falsified.

Then there’s flat, in which there’s just nothing there. But if you’re flat and you have the "Ass Smile," a lot of guys like that.

The opposite of the "Ass Smile" is the "Grimace"—that’s the one that’s a sharper, almost like sunken version of the "Ass Smile." So when you have the curvature at the bottom for the "Ass Smile," you have this sharp peak. And a lot of ladies tend to have wide hips, but never really developed the butt and never really did anything, it never grew to scale, they have that.

And then of course there are hybrids. It’s definitely going to be at least one of those and we haven’t found one yet that didn’t have some take on one.

I feel like there’s been a trend in the Western world in general lately of people preferring butts over boobs. How do you feel about booty appreciation going mainstream?
Like anything in the mainstream media, once it makes it there, it becomes completely falsified. They started talking about tits, then they started putting the fake stuff in there, and then they want to put them in the ass. So what ends up happening is an appreciation for ladies that are a little more heftier, just have a little bit of booty in there and before they were called slobs, but you might have an "AppleBottom."

One of the negative parts about that is that if you say, “Get jiggy with it,” in the hood, you’re probably going to get stabbed. When you say something and you take it and you make it too mainstream, it just becomes dead.

The majority of the hate we get is because mainstream media is kind of forcing everyone out of the woodworks to say, Hey, look at my ass! And that created the national tension for non-black ladies with booty. Now, you can’t even find these black chicks, especially on TV or modeling, without fake augmentation. They’re all trying to go bigger because they’re trying to outdo the white chicks—the Ass Arms Race if you will. That’s the negative side of popularizing it. It’s still causing more non-ethnic people to want to celebrate the booty and that’s all we care about.

That’s the other thing we don’t like about booty becoming popularized though—the race thing, the we’re-better-than-you thing. That’s not what we’re about. You also get a lot of people with fetishes that come out and try to get in on it like this guy who put a banana in this girl’s ass and sent us a picture of it.

People must send you all kinds of weird stuff.
This guy from Ukraine, he kept sending us pictures of him fisting or him putting something in there. He just kept sending them every day. We had to have someone send him back something to tell him to stop doing it. We’re appreciating ladies.

There was this one girl and the first thing she was doing was coming with butt plugs and hooks in her ass. We get some weirdo shit about putting something in the butt. Like, can you not do that? Nobody’s talking about that, no one’s talking about anal sex. It’s always about look what I put in this lady’s butt! One guy he sent us a photo of his wife, he had her spread out on the bed and had a horsetail thing in her.

It’s like the bible—there’s misinterpretation. That’s what ends up happening to ass appreciation. We’re not talking about anal sex. Not that we don’t like it, it’s just not what this site is for. Don’t come to this site if you’re thinking about penetrating someone’s ass, because that’s not what we’re about.

For the most part though, the popularization of it is a beautiful thing. But it does have its negative aspects. Like Nicki Minaj—you saw her original pictures, she’s skinny as a toothpick and now she’s got this huge ass. It’s manufactured.

What’s AssMatrix’s stance on plastic surgery?
We absolutely do not promote that; we say openly that we hate that. We hate talking about the celebrities in the booty field because most of them are fake today. The Kardashian shit—fake. What happens is we’re sitting here looking at the celebrities endorse this stuff, next thing you know all the people in the streets want to do that.

Everybody wants a cartoon ass and that’s the problem. Every time we put something out there, we want to talk about real ladies in real situations. We tell you naturally what you need to do. We put some exercise sections in there and we have people talking all day—that was Jenni’s idea. She came in and was like, “Guys, some of these people are being serious with you and they actually do want advice.” And she helped turn it around.

Is there anything else you want to say to clear the air about booty appreciation?
We don’t like stereotypes. Stereotypes don’t always work, we already put a few pieces up that were trying to smash that because we want more people to look at their bodies—if it’s not so good, maybe you can improve it. Don’t go the surgery route. That’s the same thing as doing facial reconstruction. You’re ultimately not happy with yourself and you go and pay somebody to try to make you look like something else.

If you want to do the booty appreciation, make it natural—work out, buy a DVD, check the stuff that we put on the site, and have at it. And not just anybody can have a nice ass, but you can try. It’s not one size/one look fits all. There’s different ladies, different sizes, different types. Booty appreciation has to have almost no boundaries.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter

For years, archaeologists have been puzzled by a 492-foot-long structure near the Sea of Galilee. While some believed it to be the remnants of a wall, new findings indicate that no city was nearby. Instead, an archaeologist says it was a monument built in the shape of a crescent moon between 3050 B.C. and 2650 B.C.

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Destiny

Destiny is a hit, no doubt about it. The game—an always-online multiplayer shooter from Halo creators, Bungie—reportedly cost $500 million to make, but it made that money back in just 24 hours of retail. It debuted at number one in the UK, in the process becoming the fastest-selling new video game IP of all time, replacing Watch Dogs. Its sales are roughly split 50–50 between PlayStation and Xbox platforms, proving that despite Sony’s hard sell with the software, bundling it with their PlayStation 4 console, Microsoft-owning gamers have just as eagerly snapped up copies.

And yet, it’s a not-entirely-surprising "failure," too. Reviews have been mixed, what with the game offering little in the way of genuinely revolutionary elements, with leading publications awarding the game-reserved scores. Eights from the Guardian and Eurogamer are good, but sixes from the likes of Gamespot and Polygon have seen Destiny’s Metacritic average, its "metascore," come in at 76, from a possible 100, on PS4. The Xbox One version rates slightly higher at 79, but is based on significantly fewer reviews: just six compared with the PS4’s 55.

Stop an average man on any average street and ask them what Metacritic is and he'll likely shrug. But to those active in the media—particularly games, music, TV, or cinema—the online reviews aggregator is both a blessing and blight on their industry. It can highlight undiscovered gems from years past, which is great; but equally, it can wreck a release’s chances outright. In the crowded game market, anything that falls into Metacritic’s yellow tier—titles with a metascore of 74 and 50—is likely to be overlooked for those with a green score, 75 and over.

Prototype 2 trailer

The lines are fine, and they not only divide an apparent average experience from ones perceived to be brilliant but can bring about an abrupt end to developers’ ambitions, even their employment. In its October 2012 issue, Edge magazine reported on the fate of Radical Entertainment, a Vancouver-based subsidiary studio of publisher Activision (also behind Destiny, coincidentally), in the wake of a yellow-banded reception to their that-summer-released, superhero-styled Prototype 2. The game was anticipated—its predecessor was well received, being the top-selling Xbox 360 game stateside in the month of its release. And Prototype 2 generally went down well—but its 360 metascore of 74, just a point from that magical green, caused problems.

Prototype 2

Activision, disappointed with reviews and slow sales, called for an end to the Prototype series, stating that the games had “failed to find a broad commercial audience." Substantial layoffs at Radical followed, with the studio’s senior audio director Rob Bridgett going so far as to tweet that the company itself was dead.

RIP Radical Entertainment 1991-2012

— Rob Bridgett (@rbridgett) June 28, 2012

The Edge piece went on to suggest that “anything under a perfectly respectable [metascore of] 85 might as well be a failure," before highlighting a series of Radical-like situations where publisher expectations were not met by development teams’ best efforts. Kaos Studios created Homefront in 2011, but its lukewarm reception saw THQ, itself now defunct, shut the New York–based studio down. Polygon published a fantastic piece on the Homefront saga, and its bitter conclusion for the game’s makers, in 2012, and it’s well worth a read.

Liverpool’s Bizarre Creations, behind the awesome real-world racer-with-weapons Blur and kill-streak competitive shooter The Club, was acquired by Activision in 2007 but closed just four years later, when (the green-rated!) Blur failed to turn critical praise into commercial points. Creative director Martyn Chudley was damning of the giant publisher’s role in his studio’s demise: “We weren’t making ‘our’ games anymore—we were making games to fill slots. We did believe in them, but they were more the products of committees and analysts. The culture we’d worked on for so long gradually eroded just enough so that it wasn’t ‘ours’ anymore.”

Nobody’s about to lose his job at Bungie as Destiny continues to roll out: With expansion packs coming and a number of timed events scheduled for the next few months, the game is a kind of work in progress, making a definitive rating tough so soon after its release—hence the slow reveal of official scores. And yet its Metacritic reception could cost its makers a substantial bonus payout, as Kotaku revealed on September 16. According to archive documents dating from 2010, if the game was to reach 90 on Metacritic and/or the game-specific GameRankings site—76.21% at the time of writing—Activision would honor an agreement to pay $2.5 million to its developers. Which isn’t looking likely, is it?  

Bonuses based on how a game (meta)scores is nothing new. Obsidian Entertainment missed out on substantial money from their publisher, Bethesda, when their 2010 role-playing game Fallout: New Vegas came in at 84, a single point south of activating the extra payment. Missing out on the cash resulted in necessary layoffs at the Californian studio—which was behind the surprisingly excellent South Park: The Stick Of Truth earlier in 2014—and had Ars Technica calling for an end to such a bonus system, writing: “Publishers… are using [Metacritic] improperly as some sort of final, objective arbiter for the quality of games its developers are putting out.” Which, of course, is crappy in the extreme, as we’ve all played through enjoyable games that have fallen into Metacritic’s wide yellow waters.

I can name a bundle of games that Metacritic will tell you are, at best, to be picked up in the bargain bins for a spot of attention when you’ve exhausted all the big-hitters but that I’ve fallen for fairly heavily. I was absolutely smitten with the art and atmosphere of Dontnod’s future-Paris-set adventure for Capcom, Remember Me—and I wrote about its appeal over here. Its metascore: 70. I played through the whole of The LEGO Movie Videogame with my oldest son, and we both adored its humor and simple, building-block puzzling—but there it is with a metascore of 69.

Remember Me—this game is goddamn gorgeous

Binary Domain, released in 2012, is a third-person shooter from veteran Sega designer Toshihiro Nagoshi, a man with credits on some true classics: Daytona USA, Super Monkey Ball, and the celebrated Yakuza series. Like Remember Me, its (near-future-Tokyo) setting is excellent and its action incessant, but a few minor shortcomings saw it saddled with a 74 on GameRankings. Sales were low, with only 20,000 copies sold in two months of US retail. Despite a great team behind the scenes, a decent publisher in Sega, and some positive reviews from key publications—8/10 from Eurogamer, 8.5 from Machinima—it’s one of those Edge “failures," falling into what the magazine’s 2012 piece termed the “dreaded mid-tier."

It’s incredibly difficult to bring a truly shitty game to gold status—the moment at which its code goes into mass manufacture and reaches store shelves (and digital shop fronts) the world over. Most likely fuck-ups are aborted long before the public gets wind of them. But some developers have, admirably, achieved amazingly abysmal results with relatively recent offerings: 2013’s Ride To Hell: Retribution, by Newcastle-upon-Tyne studio Eutechnyx, rated at 19/100 on Metacritic (for Xbox 360—other platforms scored lower), and the same year’s DARK, from German developer Realmforge, averaged 38 for the same system. And we definitely don’t need to say any more about Aliens: Colonial Marines, DO WE?

In its time, the massively popular Wii played host to some spectacularly awful games. These ranged from terrible movie tie-ins like Ice Age 4, to the Far Cry series’ low point Vengeance, to the abject disaster that was futuristic racer Wheelspin, a game so bad that Official Nintendo Magazine—yup, the system’s official magazine—called it “one of the worst games we’ve ever played… (that) falls apart quicker than a roll of toilet paper in a car wash." Then there was Ninjabread Man, considered “unbearable” by IGN as it awarded the game 1.5/10 and the utterly bizarre Sukeban Shachou Rena, which apparently sold just 100 copies in two weeks in Japan. The player must dodge flying cats that have taken over an office, while catching friendly ones. Or something. I don’t know. Watch the video below and try to make sense of it.

Sukeban Shachou Rena

Makes pigeon dating look totally reasonable. But legitimately bad games are becoming fewer and further between—look at the PlayStation 4’s all-time Metacritic scores so far, after almost a year on the market, and very few indeed fall into the red, with a score of 49 or less. Which goes to prove that the mid tier is becoming the new bottom rung, and going forward no developer can afford to have their game slip into the yellow if they’re to genuinely see a return on not just their hard work, but keep the faith of their number-crunching publishers.

Octodad

Destiny is fine—it’s not a great game by any means, but its shooting works, and it looks really pretty. You can be a sexy blue lady with a big gun, and that’s cool. It’s less-mainstream, lower budget, more creative efforts like Octodad: Dadliest Catch—metascore, 69—that can find themselves unfairly marginalized courtesy of being divisive, for having a few nuts and bolts loose despite, generally, being a lot of fun. I guarantee you that playing Octodad will make your life better for half an hour—and if you spent those same minutes on Destiny, you might not even get beyond its hypnotic menus.

So, go on, embrace the mid tier, and brave some of its yellows. They’re a lot brighter than so many of the formulaic greens above them, and you might even keep a few people in game development long enough for them to realize your next console obsession.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

All photos by Jenny Marc

High atop a mountain in the very center of Bulgaria sits what was supposed to be the nation’s pride and glory: the House of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Bigger in size than the Pantheon in Rome, the Buzludzha monument—a futuristic oval structure with a tower, 230 feet tall, overlooking the stunning mountain landscape—was meant to be a communist mecca. Adorning the top of the tower was a huge red star made of ruby glass that, when lit up, was seen all the way from neighboring Greece and Romania.

Built in 1981, this was peak communism.

But it all went downhill from there. As Bulgaria embarked on its difficult path toward democracy in 1989, Buzludzha was left to decay—and to polarize the post-communist society, dividing it along a love-it-or-hate-it line. Its crumbling skeleton now perches like a deserted flying saucer on top of the hill. Its red star—pillaged through the years by naïve looters who fell for the communist propaganda that it was made of ruby (it was actually plain crimson glass)—has been dark for a quarter of a century.

To fully make sense of the decay, you need to look no further than inside the monument. Though its main entrance has been sealed, there is a way in—through a small hole on the right side. To enter, you need to climb through that hole and over a 32 foot drop. As one Italian visitor told us while crawling out of it, “Just don’t look down and you’ll be fine.” Following his advice—and after a healthy dose of hesitation—we braved the pit.

What welcomed us inside could well be the setting for a post-apocalyptic film. Except for most of the marble and parts of the mosaic, there are few signs of the building's former grandeur. Built over a span of five years, Buzludzha was constructed by some 6,000 workers, most of them soldiers. It cost nearly $20 million and was supposed to be the crown jewel of communism, a manifest to its power. Today, though, the leaky roof, the gutted hallways, and the crumbling mosaic are the only remnants of the building’s glory.

When Buzludzha was inaugurated in 1981, the party’s dominance was at its zenith. Few would have predicted at the time that, less than a decade later, the communist regimes in Eastern Europe would start to fall like dominos. But years of mismanagement, planned economy, and a brewing dissatisfaction with state repression started to weigh on the totalitarian states. In Bulgaria, democracy was ushered in with a bloodless revolution in 1989. With the end of communism, the House of the Bulgarian Communist Party became a house of ghosts.

Buzludzha’s fate has remained in limbo ever since. In 2011, the then center-right government offered to transfer the monument’s ownership back to the Bulgarian Socialist Party, the ex-communists, who are still holding their annual convention just under the peak. The cash-strapped socialists, however, refused the gift and Buzludzha—once a symbol of the communists’ firm grip of power—remained in the firm grip of nature.

Buzludzha’s main function since the end of the regime it used to glorify—besides a venue for graffiti artists and a sight for hikers—is to split public opinion. For locals, it quickly became a subject of fascination as much as aversion, symbolizing the difficult relationship post-communist societies have with their past. Those nostalgic of the old days—mainly seniors and the occasional leftists—want it restored to its former greatness; those fed up with communism—mainly the middle-aged who spent their youth in a society where freedom of speech was nill—want it demolished. 

Today’s young Bulgarians actually seem to care, too. More and more people, including foreign tourists, are flocking to the monument. There were at least two dozen while we were visiting and some have even stayed overnight in tents and camper vans. Young people are also finding creative ways to appreciate the monument. The site has recently served as a venue for events, from fashion shows and art exhibitions to a setting for music videos and even a model for paper toys.

To meet this new generation, we drove through the treacherous mountain pass (a road sign simply read “Danger Zone: 15 Kilometres”) to Gabrovo, a sleepy town at the foot of the mountain some 18 miles away from the monument. There we met Radoslav Parvanov, a Buzludzha aficionado, a photographer, and a student. His fascination with Buzludzha was palpable even on the phone. “I can see the monument from my window as we speak… but you’ll probably arrive too late and it won’t be visible… but don’t worry, I have hundreds of photographs and brochures.”

For Radoslav, who has collected dozens of folders of Buzludzha memorabilia from antique shops, libraries, and museums, “this is a very strange, uniquem and even impossible place.” And for that reason, he says, “it must be restored and should be used as a museum perhaps, a gallery or a concert hall—a museum of socialism even.” One idea a couple of years back was for Buzludzha to be turned into a casino and a hotel complex. While he doesn’t necessarily approve of that particular concept, one thing is certain for Radoslav: “This place has a lot of history—a history that we can’t just throw away so lightly.”

While Radoslav’s opinion is shared by more than a few of his generation, maintaining (let alone restoring) Buzludzha is a question of money. A restoration of the monument would cost an estimated $20 million—a hefty price tag for Bulgaria, the poorest European Union member. As it stands, the authorities can neither afford to maintain nor even dismantle it.

And so, while generations of Bulgarians continue to debate the future of Buzludzha, the building itself remains at the mercy of the elements. This certainly wasn’t the intention of its creators, who proudly displayed on both sides of the main gate parts of the left-wing anthem “The Internationale.” Many of the letters have fallen off by now, but the verses are still legible: “Workers, men and women / From all sides, unite! / Forward, brave comrades! / Let’s build our great work!”

They thought they were building the future—but it just ended up in the past.

Follow Georgi Kantchev on Twitter.

Lately, directors JJ Abrams and Zack Snyder have been competing in the world's most adorable Twitter war of DC Comics vs. Star Wars oneupmanship. And Abrams has just taken the whole thing to a new level but releasing a video of his Millennium Falcon.

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These are the Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un cat scratching posts sold by The Pussycat Riot, an advocacy group of cats against cyber censorship created by the folks at HideMyAss.com, which provides virtual private network services for online anonymity. And as cool as either one would be to have, they cost £4,500 (~$7,400) apiece, making it far cheaper to print out a picture of Putin or Jong-un's face from the internet and tape it to an existing cat post. Thankfully, they also sell £3 (~$5) litter boxes with the faces of various internet censorship friendly world leaders printed on the bottom so your cats can shit all over them. All money will be donated to charity. ALLEGEDLY. It's easy to say you're GOING TO donate money to charity, it's a lot harder to actually DO it. "We're going to -- we want to stop internet censorship." And not just line your own pockets with money? "Correct." Seriously?! "YES." Okay I'm still waiting for you to wink at me. Keep going for shots of the Kim Jong-un one. Thanks to E V I L A R E S, who, for three tips in one day, gets a pizza party.

Horror anthology series V/H/S is back with another addition, titled V/H/S: Viral, and the new red band trailer does NOT disappoint. Mainly because one of the monsters appears to be folks with deadly genitals.

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By using its new dynamic lighting technology, GPU manufacturer NVIDIA has graphically recreated the Apollo 11 moon landing site — and the results are crushing a number of wild claims made by conspiracy theorists.

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Yesterday, a group of six Destiny players beat the game's first Raid. It took them ten hours. Ten hours!

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A bunch of set pictures from the brand new Star Wars movie have us all freaking out. Because they may reveal that everything we thought we knew is wrong. WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD...

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"Human" is a Stargate: Universe episode that revolves around mathematician Dr. Rush trying to crack a code. "I loved Rush's crazy scribbles of nonsense and the light code imagery," Meredith wrote in io9's original recap. Only it wasn't nonsense – it was real cryptography with consistent, breakable codes.

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What's that, Lassie?! Timmy fell in a well but you don't give a shit because he made you wear this costume?! This is the $24 Bantha Pet Costume created by Rubie's Costume Co. It makes your dog look like a bantha with a little Tusken Raider on its back. Don't even bother trying to put it on your cat because that f***er is gonna scratch you. Not to brag or anything, but I actually managed to get a costume on my cat once. I'm kidding, it was just a collar with a bell. I thought he was going to kill me. Thanks to YouTube Rhydonal, who is upset they don't make a human version.

Among fans of thought-provoking storytelling about artificial intelligence, the Swedish program Äkta Människor (Real Humans) has become legendary. And now it looks like the English-language remake could be appearing on our screens next year.

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The best way to cope with traffic is actually to make multi-lane highways smaller, not bigger. Several long-term studies have shown that "road diets" that shrink 4-line highways to 3-lane highways significantly decrease traffic jams and accidents. Atlantic's CityLab has the story.

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They're strong and menacing, but do Americans need to go after them? Photo courtesy of VICE News

At this point the Islamic State (IS) has much of the Western world in a perpetual state of apoplectic shock. Everyone from fashionistas to Mia Farrow to the old white men who set US foreign policy in Washington are terrified, and they want to do something about it. Once a ragtag band of jihadists, IS has conquered generous swaths of Iraq and Syria, and maybe more important, they look scary, wield machetes, and behead American journalists on YouTube. They also have a fondness for ethnic warfare that inches toward genocide and long to establish an Islamic caliphate—which naturally inspires hatred and fear all over the world.

The question is, after the disaster that was post-invasion Iraq, should America be attempting to solve the Mesopotamian quagmire again? According to President Obama, the answer is maybe—he'll be giving a speech Wednesday night outlining his strategy. But given that his administration has already launched airstrikes against IS in Iraq, it seems like ground troops might be an inevitable next step. The good news for doves (of which there seems to be an ever-decreasing supply in DC, especially now that Rand Paul is on board with the Pentagon destroying ISIS) is that one anti-war Democrat from Florida remembers all too well what happened the last time neoconservatives decided Iraq needed saving. Congressman Alan Grayson sent a letter to the US ambassadors of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, and Morocco last week with a simple ask: pony up a few thousand troops each so we can take down the bad guys. But the "we" in this case would not involve non-Muslim Westerners, potentially reducing the backlash that cowboy-style intervention tends to engender.

I talked with Grayson about his plan, why the same people who got us into Iraq still have so much influence over foreign policy, and whether the hysteria over the Islamic State makes it easier for elites to avoid dealing with climate change. Here's what he had to say.

VICE: Everyone from celebrities to think tanks to the president seems to be preparing for a war with IS, but is it really an American problem?
Alan Grayson: There is sort of a "You first!" problem here, which is that there are many countries that feel something should be done about this, but they don't want to be the first to step forward and do it. We've developed a sort of cultural dependency throughout the Middle East among our Arab allies. They expect us to solve their problems for them. I think we have to try to break that habit. We've already been involved in numerous wars in the Middle East over the past several decades, and often create new problems with those wars.

Are you hearing about this from voters in your district?
I had a meeting in Orlando with some constituents yesterday, and I asked them what was the most important issue to them. One said she didn't want to see any more beheadings on her TV. That indicates that concern about what's happening in Iraq and Syria has now broken through to the general public. Usually people are preoccupied with their own concerns and their own lives. But the sheer brutality of what IS has done to two Americans now has made it clear to many people that something needs to be done about this. The problem is the president said he didn't have a plan yet—his words, not mine. I felt somebody needed to do something to develop a coherent plan.

Explain the logic behind getting Arab countries to take on IS.
I think it's obvious that a regional military group composed of soldiers who share the same language as the people on the ground in Syria and Iraq, have the same religion, and understand the culture and the nuances of local life there are more likely to be successful than, say, US forces were occupying Iraq for almost a decade. And by successful I mean to reach a conclusion that everyone regards as a genuine peace. These are countries with military capabilities—we're not talking about Mauritania here. Every one of these is a predomianntly Sunni country, because we're talking about reclaiming and pacifying Sunni territory in Iraq. The Shiite-run army of Iraq has found it impossible to do so. I believe Sunni fighters from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and so on, are more likely to be accepted by the local population than either Shiite soldiers from Baghdad or, for that matter, US fighters. Somebody had to get the ball rolling, so I did.

We're hearing from a lot of the same voices that were loudly calling for war with Iraq in 2002 and 2003. What does it say about our democracy that they still wield tremendous influence?
The military-industrial complex is extremely powerful. Clearly, there are neoconservatives who desperately want us to be in one war, two wars, five wars—the more the merrier as far as they're concerned. And in fact it's an identifiable group: We see them on our TVs from time to time, and they pop up frequently on Sunday morning news shows. They have never learned from their mistakes. Last year, those people wanted us to bomb Syria to help IS, now they want us to bomb IS to help Syria. Think this through: Last year, these very same people wanted us to bomb the command-and-control structure of the Syrian military that was controlling chemical weapons. If we had done so, those chemical weapons would have fallen into the hands of the opposition, and specificialy IS. So today we wouldn't be talking about beheadings, we'd be talking about IS conducting chemical warfare! 

Do you worry that IS—the novel threat of the year—is distracting from more existential problems?
It's postponing what we have deserved now for decades, which is our peace dividend. With the decline and fall of the Soviet Union and the absence of any existential threat to the United States, people expected we could wind down our military to the point where it was not consuming any more of the economy than it does in, say, Europe. But it didn't happen. And it didn't happen because of 9/11. Now bin Laden is dead. We seem to have figured out how to avoid major terrorist attacks within our borders, and yet we are still spending half a trillion dollars a year on our military. And I am concerned that IS—which does not in any sense threaten the 50 states—that the bright new shiny object is once again keeping us from repairing our economy. We have major imbalances in the economy, and the fact that we spend almost as much on our military as the rest of the world combined is one of them.

Polling has shown Democrats see climate change as more significant threat than the Islamic State. Does starting a new project in the Middle East make it harder to deal with that problem?
I remember candidate Obama telling us all in 2008, "You have to be able to work on more than thing at a time if you want to be president of the United States." And I think that principle applies well here. The fact that people want to take action to avenge two dead Americans is not to the exclusion of taking action to save the planet. He's got two years and two months to figure it out.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

By now, you've already seen (or at least know about) Blackfish. And you know that public opinion has turned pretty significantly against SeaWorld. 

Over a year after the film's release, people are still mad about it. In the last few weeks, a Huffington Post article titled "The End of SeaWorld" has shown up on my Twitter and Facebook multiple times. If the article is to be believed, SeaWorld, as a company, is "finished."

As a person who has never been to SeaWorld, I was unsure if its closing would be any real loss, so I decided to spend a day there to find out.

I was worried that the park might end up being really fun and I'd have to write something about how awesome it is and give them a bunch of free positive PR, but—spoiler alert—the park turned out to be a steaming pile of dog shit. Phew!

The highlight of the park, without question, is the moments spent walking from your car to the entrance, before you find out that a ticket costs an insane $84. It's all downhill from there.

Upon entering, the first thing that greets you as you is a series of aquatic-petting-zoo-type things where you're able to touch sea creatures.

Or, more accurately, lift sea creatures out of the water and prod them while your parents take photos rather than telling you to put them back in the fucking water. Like this starfish. 

Every once in a while, the teenage girl supervising the pool would remind everyone not to take the creatures out of the water because "they need water to breathe!" But her requests, for the most part, fell on deaf ears.

Beyond the petting pools, there are enclosures featuring animals that are just to look at. Like this turtle, which had some kind of raw, bloody wound. 

When someone in the crowd asked what was wrong with it, the girl manning the enclosure said something about antibiotics, before pushing the turtle back into the water and out of sight. 

Now, I know that the only reason people care so much about the orcas is because a very popular documentary was released telling them they should feel bad for them. And, really, there's no difference between these animals and the pandas down the street at the San Diego Zoo, or the chickens being sold as nuggets in the onsite restaurants. Any animal being exploited is a giant bummer. 

That said, it would be impossible to watch Blackfish and not feel extra sad when seeing these animals swimming in an endless loop, existing as little more than backgrounds for selfies. 

The main draw of SeaWorld is, of course, the shows.

I suppose I'd never really thought about what happens in a SeaWorld show before actually attending one. My entire exposure to them previously had been in five-second montages in travel documentaries and commercials. Which, honestly, made them seem quite exciting. 

However, the amount of things a killer whale is able to do to entertain people who are sitting above the surface is limited to exactly one thing, which is to jump out of the water before quickly falling back in. 

And as impressive as it is that their trainers are able to teach these animals to do that on command, there are only so many times that it's entertaining to see an orca jump out of the water for a second. And if you're anything like me, that number of times is exactly once. 

This is something SeaWorld seems to be aware of, as they've done a lot to try to dress up the shows. After tossing a bunch of bells and whistles on to the act of jumping-out-of-the-water-for-one-second, they manage to polish this turd into a performance that lasts more than 20 minutes. 

The show starts with a SeaWorld trainer coming out and asking for "members of the US Military past and present and its allies from around the world" to stand up. We, as an audience, were then asked to applaud, as patriotic music blasted out and a trainer explained that "SeaWorld is not only committed to men and women in uniform... but the world we all share."

Which, up until that point in my life, was the corniest thing I had ever seen.

It would be hard to overstate how horrifically, offensively trite the music that began playing next was. The best way I can think to describe it is to imagine that there were a Christian remake of the TV show Glee, and they were doing a Lion King on Broadway tribute episode featuring vocals by Donny Osmond (and Donny had been castrated prior to recording).

You can listen to the full soundtrack here. Here's a sampling of the lyrics: 

Many times it happens, just by surprise,
Out in the world, in front of your eyes—
You see a little kindness, someone who lends a hand,
The caring, sharing spreads like a vine,
When they return the kindness, passing it on down the line.

Even the guy who's in charge of rewriting stuff for Kidz Bop to make it more kid-friendly ("Out in the club / And I'm eatin' that grub / And you're not gonna reach my telephone") would describe it as "a bit much."

The rest of the show was filled in with SeaWorld trainers dancing and delivering messages about the importance of conserving the environment. Throughout the show, the trainers fake-grinned so hard they were almost incapable of speaking. 

It's the kind of children's entertainment thought up by people who never speak to children. The kind of people who burst into tears over someone's commitment to Sparkle Motion. 

The second show I went to see was the dolphin show, which was more of the same. More animals jumped out of the water, and more dickheads danced around on the sidelines to saccharine, patronizing music. 

This time around, there was a plot of some sort. I'm not totally sure what it was. Something about a girl jumping out of her bedroom window and then befriending someone who was dressed as a parrot in order to protect the environment? IDK.

I can imagine that, in the 60s, when the park had just opened, this would've been like that scene in Jurassic Park where they see the brachiosaurus for the first time. But, in 2014, it definitely isn't cutting it. The kids watching this show are kids who grew up with the internet, kids who have 3-D TVs in their homes, and a device in their pocket that allows them to watch any movie ever made. You're gonna have to come at them with something a bit more impressive than animals repeatedly jumping to a soundtrack that sounds like it was written by Trey Parker to make fun of Christians. 

I assume they're probably making a lot of money out of this venture, but you have to really wonder if it's really worth ruining the lives of some animals and having the entire world hate you for it.

Beyond the shows, there are a few rides—a rollercoaster, a gondola, a couple of water rides. Nothing massively exciting.

Despite the fact that SeaWorld is in Southern California, the people who designed the park never thought to make any kind of shade to stand in while lining up for the attractions. I visited the park on a quiet day when I never waited more than 20 minutes for a ride. But still, by the time it came to actually boarding, I looked and felt like I'd just run a marathon. I can't imagine how un-fun it would be on a busier or hotter day. 

And that's pretty much my entire day at SeaWorld: two shows, two rides, and a bunch of hours spent staring at sad-looking animals. I'm not sure what the antonym is for the word "recommendation," but whatever it is, that's what I would apply to a trip to SeaWorld.

I feel that, if you're gonna abuse animals for the entertainment of others, it should least be entertaining to others. I'm not saying that would make SeaWorld acceptable or justified, but at least maybe the $84 entrance fee might sting a little less. 

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

Thumbnail screencap via CBS News on Youtube

Roger Goodell needs to be fired. It’s that simple. There’s such a litany of reasons why he should kick rocks that I'm not sure where to start. His alleged involvement in the cover-up of concussion-induced CTE, his draconian punishments for recreational (and sometimes state-legal) drug use, and his support of the racist Washington team name—the one journalists aren't even allowed to type—all spring to mind. But of course, most recently there's been his tragically incompetent mishandling of the NFL’s domestic-violence epidemic. Not to mention his ongoing disregard for the health and well-being of retired veteran players, the fucking lockout, or his Mr. Burns–esque war on referees. 

Fuck Roger Goodell.

As a lifelong football fan (for the Green Bay Packers, so double-fuck Goodell for the Fail Mary), I'm finding it increasingly difficult to watch the sport I love. There’s been plenty of ink spilled on that subject. Dozens of stories, in print or onscreen, point out the moral quandaries one confronts when supporting a game that is mired in arch hypocrisy, victim blaming, and stubborn ignorance— all stemming from the commissioner’s office. 

You might think it's just a game, but context matters: Every NFL player’s dream is to win a Super Bowl. Most won’t even make the playoffs. However, those who do receive post-season bonuses in the tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars. The athletes who suit up are often the best of the best the NFL has to offer, and they are handsomely rewarded for their abilities by the League. Given all this, a question arose in my head.

Just how many players who have received these bonuses have also been charged, arrested or cited in violence against women? How many Super Bowl winners have struck their wife or girlfriend with the same hand that now bears a Super Bowl ring—the ultimate achievement in America’s most popular sport? And how many did it under the ham-fisted rule of Roger Goodell?

Using USA Today’s NFL Player Arrest Database (a necessary thing that exists), I compiled the names of any player that fits that description. The results were more surprising than I expected. Thirty-nine men have made the playoffs in Goodell’s NFL who have also been arrested or summoned for a crime against a woman. Super Bowl winners include Ray Rice, Erik Walden, Will Smith, Michael Boley, James Harrison, Tony McDaniel, and Rocky Bernard. This list doesn’t even include Super Bowl winners like Terrell Suggs, who was merely accused of punching his fiancée in the neck in front of their fucking kids. You can look over the whole list I've compiled here.

Sixteen of the men are still in the league, while the 17th, James Harrison, retired a week ago. He went back to the Steelers to retire. The Steelers, of course, are Quarterbacked by the Bill Cosby of the NFL, owner of as many Super Bowl Rings as on-the-record sexual assault accusations, Ben Roethlisberger.

One of those men still in the league was the first case of domestic violence Goodell had to deal with, less than a week after becoming commissioner. That man is Miami Dolphin Randy Starks, whose fiancée actually lost some of her fingernails during the attack (By the way, whoever keeps up the USA Today database is doing a great job, but change your fucking verbiage, dude. Calling a fight between a woman and a 6’3'', 305-pound man a “scuffle” is incredibly tone-deaf).

The most recent addition to this list is, of course, 49er Ray McDonald. Over Labor Day weekend, he was arrested for beating his pregnant fiancée. The person most likely to be added to this list? Denver Safety TJ Ward, who was accused of throwing a glass at a female bartender. Barring another Peyton Manning neck injury, he will soon make his first playoff appearance.

Despite all this evidence, despite repeated calls for his resignation from Senators to perhaps the only respectable windbag at ESPN, Goodell, somehow, remains commissioner. He, a pathetic excuse for a leader, is the steward of a roughly $10-billion-a-year industry. His callous demeanor, T-1000 eyes, and backwards approach to anything involving emotion should make him ripe for scapegoating. It’s truly a mystery why, after so many fuckups, and now outraged pundits beginning to advocate for a boycott, a group of old white billionaires have yet to turn on him to save themselves and their fortunes.

Who can stomach a guy who is so lenient on violent acts against women? A man who, in his staunchest critique of this kind of violence, said: 

You do not have to be convicted or even charged of a crime to be able to demonstrate that you've violated a personal conduct policy, and reflect poorly not only on themselves, but all of their teammates, every NFL player in the league, and everyone associated with the NFL. 

But he seems to have no problem with the fact that it's an empty platitude, considering that—for one—Carolina Panther Greg Hardy was found guilty of assaulting his girlfriend this July, and yet, will suit up next Sunday against the Lions.

Three days before the Super Bowl involving Ben Roethlisberger, during the season he was suspended after being accused of sexual assault, noted NFL lackey Peter King quoted Goodell as saying he "doesn't feel any connection'' to Big Ben and that “not one, not a single player, went to his defense.” Goodell ended up reducing Roethlisberger’s six game suspension to only four.

Next month, the NFL trots out its dumb pink uniforms, “supporting” a breast cancer charity that is troubling at best. Ostensibly, this is to promote awareness of women’s health. Yet this becomes another in the long line of Roger Goodell’s hypocrisies. How many of the men wearing these pink uniforms have been protected by the commissioner’s office for themselves harming a woman?

Maybe next October, Goodell should propose that players wear black and blue uniforms, to raise awareness of the NFL’s backwards treatment of violence against women. 

In the meantime, we’re stuck with Goodell and his ludicrous policies. Let’s face facts: A boycott of the NFL doesn't look likely, but if we, fans and media, continue to call for his resignation, while at least entertaining the idea of a boycott, we might actually achieve something. Roger Goodell works for the NFL owners, and they’ve proven they don’t care about people who work for them. However, if the uproar gets loud enough, they will be forced to protect the one thing they truly care about: their money.

Follow Josh Androsky on Twitter.

Not to be outdone by European fast food chain Quick's Darth Vader themed black-bun burger, Burger King Japan has just announced a burger with black buns, black sauce and black CHEESE. Apparently the patty contains black pepper, the buns and cheese are blackened with bamboo charcoal, and the onion and garlic sauce contains squid ink. I'd try it. I just had a cheeseburger last night but it was not black. It was tan and brown and yellow and red and green. It was like eating a rainbow. "Like Skittles?" Absolutely nothing like Skittles, it was a f***ing cheeseburger. Do your parents even know you're on the internet? Also, you know how some kids refuse to eat foods that are a certain color? Well I know some adults that are still that way. They're really hard to stay friends with. Keep going for several more shots of the black burgers. Thanks to rob the jerk, Christina and tabby, who agree it's only a matter of time before scientists develop clear burgers like Crystal Pepsi.

Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan says it's time to end drug prohibition. Photo by Eric Roset

A record number of people are using drugs. Farmers are growing more heroin than ever before, and criminal organizations are making so much money from the sale of illicit narcotics that their revenues dwarf the legal trade in cereal, wine, beer, coffee, and tobacco combined. The war on drugs has succeeded in ruining millions of lives, with people worldwide thrown in prison for nothing more than getting high and helping others do the same–or getting murdered in the crossfire of drug war violence. Prohibition has so miserably failed to achieve any of its stated goals that even gross old politicians, the last to embrace change, are saying the status quo is unacceptable. Legalization, once a topic only seriously discussed in college dorms, has gone mainstream.

“Ultimately, the most effective way to reduce the extensive harms of the global drug prohibition regime and advance the goals of public health and safety is to get drugs under control through responsible legal regulation,” says a new report from the Global Commission on Drugs. The group—composed of establishment luminaries such as former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, billionaire Richard Branson, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, and honorary co-chair George Shultz, who served as US Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan—unveiled its recommendations this morning at a press conference in New York. A delegation, including former president of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo, then met with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has previously called drug addiction “a disease, not a crime.”

For a group of stodgy old politicians, who tend to be experts in saying lots of words that mean nothing at all, the recommendations are refreshingly blunt. “Stop criminalizing people for drug use and possession,” the report says, but not only that: “Stop imposing ‘compulsory treatment’ on people whose only offense is drug use or possession.” That last clause marks an important shift. Before, the liberal and humanitarian approach to drugs was to approach it as a “public health” issue rather than a criminal one, which in practice meant confining drug users to for-profit treatment centers rather than for-profit prisons—an improvement, perhaps, but ultimately just kinder, gentler form of mass incarceration.

It also doesn’t work, coercively treating people for a legally determined addiction—including to substances as relatively innocuous as marijuana—that the user has no personal desire to cure. Nowadays, the largest public health bodies are leading the charge against mandatory drug rehab. In July, for instance, the World Health Organization said countries “should ban compulsory treatment for people who use and/or inject drugs.”

The commission’s report reflects the new consensus. “Using the criminal justice system to force people arrested for drug possession into ‘treatment’ often does more harm than good,” the report says. Drug courts that are sold as an alternative to the lock-’em-away ethos of the drug war because they mandate treatment instead of prison time are, according to the commission, no alternative at all, but rather an attempt to “retrospectively impose a health-based approach within a criminal justice paradigm.” If one wishes to protect drug users, one must work to reduce “the likelihood of people who use drugs coming into contact with the criminal justice system in the first place.” That means not arresting them in the first place.

“The treatment model most likely to deliver the best outcomes for an individual is one decided between the individual and their doctor or service provider,” says the commission, “free from political interference or coercion.” The state should offer a helping hand, not an iron fist.

The current approach certainly isn’t working, at least if the availability and use of illegal drugs is the metric and not drug rehab profits or prison beds filled. According to the UN, there were 203 million drug users in 2008; by 2012, there were 243 million. Global opium production has risen 380 percent since 1980. Drug trafficking organizations in Mexico have a larger budget for bribes than the state has for its attorney general’s office thanks to revenues that, according to the UN, exceed the total revenues generated by the export of coffee, cigarettes and alcohol.

But change? Good luck waiting for that. As welcome as it is to see decrepit old men lining up to endorse the Global Drug Commission’s recommendations, the people saying the right thing now were generally doing the wrong thing back when they had real political power. It’s only in retirement that many politicians find their voice.

Bolivian coca growers celebrate the legalization of coca-leaf chewing. Photo by Matthew Straubmuller

To be fair, it’s not as if the former presidents who have signed onto the commission’s recommendations had a lot of choice in the matter. Members of the United Nations are, at least technically, forbidden from doing what the commission recommends: regulating drugs as opposed to outright prohibiting them. When Uruguay first considered legalizing marijuana, the UN’s International Narcotics Control Board warned the South American nation that it would “be in complete contravention to the provisions of the international drug treaties to which [it] is party.” In 2016, however, there will be a United Nations General Assembly Special Session on drugs, which commission chairman and former president of Brazil Henrique Cardoso believes will offer “an historic opportunity to discussion the shortcomings of the drug control regime.”

Given the lack of urgency to address the crisis of international climate change with a new treaty, though, what’s the chance the global community will tear apart existing ones that require states to pledge allegiance to drug prohibition—and do so over the objections of a US empire? Not great, though with the US unable to rally sufficient opposition to block Bolivia from legalizing the chewing of coca leaves, there is cause for optimism.

"Colorado and Washington legalizing marijuana was an absolute game changer," said Tom Angell, a long-time drug policy reform campaigner who heads the group Marijuana Majority. "When the US has legal marijuana in its own backyard, it's much harder for our federal government to go around telling other countries that they cannot reform their own drug policies."

Still, reform on the international level comes at a glacial pace, the fact it’s even being considered because the states at the bottom, from Uruguay to Colorado, have forced the issue. Hope for change and work for it, but unless your lungs are full of burning plant matter, don’t hold your breath.

Follow Charles Davis on Twitter.

This is the Beer Briefcase available from Perpetual Kid ($45, although you could make your own out of any briefcase and some foam padding). It holds six beers. It doesn't cool them or anything, it just keeps them well protected. Although if you show up at my place with this thing and you'll probably get asked to leave. Just not before I jimmy the lock and steal your beers.

It's Friday night, and you want to bring a 6-pack of your best beer to a friends house party. Ordinary bland people would just use the flimsy cardboard carrier they came in risking damage to the beers in transit and showing zero originality. But not you. You want to make a statement and arrive in style. YOU put YOUR beers in our secret service looking Beer Briefcase. In this second to none, brewski carrying device, each bottle will be nestled in its own foam cutout spot and protected from any unnecessary clanging against its neighbor. This seriously fun metallic case immediately elevates your status at the party and people want to get to know the guy with the beer carrying case! Cha-Ching! You win. No need to lose your head worrying about someone stealing your secret stash of dank beers! This bad boy comes with dual combination locks! Beer not included. 100% not compatible with hipsters.

100% not compatible with hipsters? What does that even mean? Is it because they only drink PBR cans? I don't get it. I feel like this would be a MUST HAVE hipster accessory. Like a girlfriend who spends $300 at Anthropologie to look like she shops at the thrift store. Thanks to Marcus O, who carries beers the way God intended: already in his belly.

This is a video of ready-to-die Will Williams chugging a fifth of Jack Daniels in 13-seconds. You should not try this at home. Or a friend's home. Or in a nearby parking lot like Will is in the video. Nice Mumford & Sons shirt, by the way. You like that 'I Will Wait' song a lot? That's very hardcore of you.

"We were appalled at the video because it depicts very irresponsible and dangerous behavior," Jack Daniel's spokesman Phil Lynch told the Daily News. "Many people don't realize that kind of consumption could be very harmful to people and could kill them in certain circumstances."

Wait -- many people don't realized that chugging an entire bottle of liquor could be harmful? How do people not know that? Are these the same people that are into butt-chugging? I bet these are the same people that are into butt-chugging. You know, maybe alcohol just isn't for you. Keep going for the video. Thanks to Greg, BEASMO and S, who agree if you want to try the same thing, use apple juice.

Campus police at Ohio University. Photo via Wikimedia

In 1968, students at Columbia University staged a mass uprising, joining other college campuses in protesting not just the war in Vietnam, but their school’s collaboration with the Institute for Defense Analysis, a Defense Department affiliate that researches weapons technologies. Today, weapons produced by that institute are used by the US military throughout the world—and by campus police forces across the country. The war has come home.

The Pentagon’s 1033 program, which allows the Defense Department to unload its excess military equipment onto local police forces, has quietly overflowed onto college campuses. According to documents obtained by the website Muckrock, more than 100 campus police forces have received military materials from the Pentagon. Schools that participate in the program range from liberal arts to community colleges to the entire University of Texas system. Emory, Rice, Purdue, and the University of California, Berkeley, are all on the list.

In 1990, Congress enacted the National Defense Authorization Act, including the magnanimous section 1208, which since 1996 has been known as program 1033. Over the last 17 years, this trickle-down gift economy has distributed more than $4.3 billion worth of equipment, according to program administrators. As Ferguson police rolled up to peaceful protesters in military-grade tanks, firing tear gas and rubber bullets, President Obama ordered a review of the program, which reached new highs in regifting under his tenure. 

It’s clear why a review of the program is in order, because it isn’t clear at all what sort of equipment these colleges are receiving. David Perry, the president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, told Politico that 1033 mostly funnels “small items” to college police forces for daily use. These could be anything from office supplies or uniforms or car parts, but it’s probably not all that tame. Campus Safety magazine recommends that universities take part in the 1033 program to cover a range of needs from storage units to grenade launchers. That is, after all, what the program was designed to achieve.

But program 1033 doesn’t even come close to explaining all the ways in which campus police have been militarized over the past two decades. Colleges can also apply for Homeland Security grants, the same ones made available to every municipal police department in the country after 9/11. In 2012, UC Berkeley tried to use the program to purchase an eight-ton armored truck. After a backlash, university officials ultimately decided the truck was “not the best choice for a university setting.” The following year, Ohio State University acquired a mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicle. So far, it has yet to be targeted.

Other college policies are even more difficult to quantify, though they pose immense obstacles to the cultures of free action and thought that academic institutions are supposed to cultivate. One such policy is the Memorandum of Understanding, in which local law enforcement enters into an official partnership with campus “peace officers.” Sometimes memoranda of understanding can have positive impacts on students, as when they are established between universities and rape crisis centers to ensure that anyone seeking help receives proper care. In this sort of arrangement, universities work with centers and both institutions train one another, so that resources and knowledge are shared. This is what happens with local and campus police arrangements: The departments draft vague language to work in concert on operations both on and off campus, but the actual extent of this partnership is not well documented, with the line between campus police forces and those controlled by local government fuzzy at best.

Several campus police forces have also been vigorously trained in paramilitary tactics since 2007. In a country where SWAT teams raid private residencies more than 100 times a day, mostly in neighborhoods where people of color live, the decision to train campus officers in this overindulged art is a vote in favor of racist policing tactics on the part of institutions of higher education, even before the training is ever put to use.

In the 1960s, campuses went into lockdown because students were occupying buildings; now, they often go into lockdown because campus police are itching to stretch their military muscles. Horrible crimes have been committed with guns at colleges, but using the Virginia Tech massacre and other shootings to justify turning universities into police states is disingenuous considering that campuses are still among the safest places in the country—and these tactics clearly aren’t making them any safer. But amped up fears have made it easy for the Pentagon and local law enforcement to align with campus police while being met with little pushback.

Just last month, campus police at Cal State San Marcos put the university on lockdown based on intelligence that a man was walking around campus with a gun. The suspect, they later learned, was armed only with an umbrella. In December 2013, American University in Washington, DC shut down its academic operations to search for a reported gunman who turned out to be an off-duty police officer. On Wednesday, Denison University and all other schools in the district of Granville, Ohio, were locked down after police received a phony threat of an impending shooting.

Concurrent with increasing lockdown drills and stockpiling of weapons is the stifling of student dissent. In 2009, during the G-20 Summit, student protestors at the University of Pittsburgh were demonstrating peacefully on their campus when cops demanded they disperse, then quickly proceeded to arrest several of them. Police sprayed pepper gas at passersby and onto the balconies of residences where students were watching the scene below.

There was also the infamous mass pepper spraying of Occupy demonstrators at UC Davis in 2011. Police used CS gas, pepper pellets, and beanbag rounds on UC student protesters throughout 2012. When students and workers at UC Riverside publicly demanded the scaling back of university privatization in a number of sectors, they were met with batons and paintball pellets. 

The list of infringements upon student dissent, student space, and student bodies, is too long to enumerate here. Yet, importantly, it is also impossible to quantify, because incidents are never added up and detailed funding records never corralled into a comprehensible database. In the absence of serious oversight and accounting, narratives are stitched together, stories swapped, and a picture of violent state surveillance and control emerges. The picture squares with what we see in cities, towns, and communities across America.

And it squares with much of what’s taken place in response to the killing of Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in important ways, including the swiftness and brutality with which police met protestors in Ferguson and the importance of young people and youth culture in conveying images of that brutality to the world. Most of the protesters in Ferguson and those marching in solidarity across the country are young, and young people are more likely to support curtailing police power than their aged peers. 

Perhaps this has something to do with the channels through which the story unfolding in Ferguson was most urgently told: grainy feeds on guerrilla news sites, social media, and, yes, websites geared toward millennials like VICE. It probably also has to do with the fact that so many young people mistrust the government, no matter who’s in charge. But perhaps most important, it’s young people, mostly young people of color, who are the targets of policies that feed the warrior cop ethos: increased surveillance, stop-and-frisk, and arrest quotas fueled by government grants. Joel Anderson wrote for Buzzfeed that most of the protestors in Ferguson “are young black men and some women from Ferguson and the surrounding inner suburbs of St. Louis who see themselves in Brown—not just because he was 18 and black, but also because they have their own tales of being harassed by police.”

A few weeks ago, activist and journalist Mariame Kaba asked on Twitter: “How can we build a movement to divest from police? Is there a way for us to do this? Can we go after local police budgets?”

One place to start is with those college campuses whose police forces receive 1033 and Homeland Security funding. The time is ripe for student journalists and activists to use the information furnished by Muckrock and to do their own digging to take on police divestment campaigns with the tenacity, political savvy, and exuberance that’s pushed universities nationwide to divest from fossil fuels, private prisons, and Israeli occupation. Young people in solidarity with the people of Ferguson and the families who have lost sons and daughters at the hands of militant police are poised to illuminate these connections between education, state surveillance, and state violence in a uniquely powerful way.

The latest figures: Between January 1 and August 29 of this year, nearly 600 confirmed measles cases were reported to the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. The resurgence is the greatest the U.S. has seen since the disease was eliminated from the country in 2000.

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All illustrations by Nick Gazin

Sex. It’s important. So important, in fact, that it’s not only the title of this piece, it’s also the very first word. At this point you may be wondering if "sex" is also the last word of this piece. Go ahead! Skip to the end and find out! OK, happy now? Good. Let’s begin.

Sex. What the heck is it? Generally speaking, sex—shorthand for "sexual intercourse"—is the insertion and thrusting of a male’s penis into a female’s vagina for the purposes of reproduction and/or pleasure. Pretty erotic definition, huh? That's from Wikipedia, and needless to say I got so worked up reading it I almost "WikiLeaked" in my pants!

But that’s not all sex is these days—nay, not by a long shot. In fact, the bedroom antics of a modern sex-haver in Obama’s "anything goes" America is enough to make a Juggalo blush. And that’s why I put together the following compendium of carnal knowledge—to help you, the reader, navigate the topsy-turvy landscape of today’s dynamic fuckvironment.

Anal Sex
Anal sex is intercourse via the anus. Its popularity skyrocketed recently when scientists announced a woman is up to 50 percent less likely to conceive a child when getting ass-rammed than when having her pussy plowed. Anal is also the preferred method of intercourse among gay men. And understandably so—I mean, have you tried stuffing your entire cock into another man’s pee-hole?!? To quote ET: “OUCH!”

Ass-Eating
This disgusting act seems to be all the rage among millennials. I’m surprised they even have time to stick a tongue up a butthole what with all the time spent on selfies, memes, Snapchats, and Netflix. Heck, millennials think Girls is a good television program—is it really surprising they also enjoy the taste of shit? (Totally JK, to the two Girls writers who follow me on Twitter.)

Blowjobs
These are those things hack stand up comics complain about their wives not doing anymore during their "marriage is lame" chunks. Truth is, getting a BJ feels pretty darn good—but hearing someone refer to it as a "blowie" is almost enough to make you lose your boner.

Boners
The thing hearing someone say "blowie" is almost enough to make you lose.

Cheating
Remember: there’s no such thing as cheating. If your partner catches you in the act, just come up with a clever excuse, like you were “masturbating with my secretary’s vagina lips” or “using the pool guy’s dick as a dildo” or “cream-peeing some white urine into our son’s third grade teacher’s mouth-toilet.”

Dildo
An object shaped like a penis used for sexual simulation. Named for when Lucrecia Stansbury, a noted baker in the 1800s, discovered it felt awesome to stuff a tube of the raw dough she used to bake her famous dill bread (her "dill dough," if you will) into her cooch.

Double-Ended Dildo
The opposite of a double-beginninged dildo. By the way, if that scene at the end of Requiem For a Dream doesn’t get you at least a little horny, you’re less twisted than me, friend.

Eating Pussy
The technical term for this is cunnilingus. And that hilarious joke where you say you’re a "cunning linguist" never gets old—so keep on saying it, Lars Ulrich!

Fingerblasting
The sex product market has exploded (no pun intended) recently with innovative new devices designed to blast vaginas, but most sex-havers agree: the original is still the best. That’s right, the ol’ tried-and-true—the finger—remains the go-to vag-blasting tool among die-hard blasters and blastees. Notably, the finger also continues its dominance in the field of booger extraction.

Fisting
Ever felt an overwhelming desire to punch your enemy as hard as you can, square in the colon? Well, be warned: If she’s a fan of this fucked up freaky shit, she may actually enjoy your journey getting up in there!

Giraffes
All I know is I wouldn’t waste all day eating leaves if my neck was so long I could suck my own dick.

Handjobs
Too lazy to jack yourself off? Pay a stripper to do it for ya, King Henry VIII!

Happy Ending
When a masseuse sexually manipulates a man’s penis to completion at the end of a massage. Not to be confused with a "sad ending," where the masseuse pours semen into his dickhole.

Huge Penis-Haver Magazine
Fellas, always carry a copy of this fake magazine I just made up around so you can pretend to read it if an attractive woman sits across from you on the subway.

Jizz Rag
That Obama shirt MoveOn.org sent you back in ‘08, probably.

Kama Sutra
That book no one has ever read in your stoner fuck-buddy’s bedside lube drawer. Maybe replace those corny illustrations with some Aishwarya Rai nude action pics and we’ll give it a second chance, Ravi.

Masturbation
Woody Allen once jokingly called masturbation “sex with someone I love.” Pretty amazing that a jazz clarinet enthusiast who married his own daughter could love himself.

Monogamy
That thing your married friends won’t admit sucks until after they’re divorced.

Orgasm
Those five to 15 seconds before you start figuring out how to get this weirdo out of your apartment.

Polygamy
You don’t think one wife is enough? You’ve obviously never been married, Utah Joe.

Porn
A magical world where a bleach blonde bimbo with massive fake tits becomes a doctor by putting on a pair of glasses and a white lab coat.

Robin Thicke
The reason there’s suddenly so many lesbians.

S.E.X.
A song by Nickelback I’ve never heard but just stumbled across the existence of on Google. The lyrics are so stupid they make KISS’s discography look like a collection of Shakespeare sonnets.

Sex Trafficking
Look, all I know is the "sex traffic" going in and out of your mom’s bedroom last night was pretty heavy! HEY-OOOOOOOOOH

Sexpert
A hussy with a lit degree desperately trying to market her sex blog after realizing she’s a 35-year-old barista.

Sixty-Nine
Nothing says “I have a debilitating fear of intimacy that I’m occasionally horny enough to briefly overcome” like wanting to sixty-nine.

Titty Fucking
Every woman’s favorite position. Nothing brings the human female to orgasm faster than having to wrap her boobs around the dick of some tit-fixated perv whose mom refused to breastfeed him while he drags his sweaty balls across her belly. Ah, how she loves the full weight of a grown adult male bouncing on her midsection! Don’t forget to cum in her eyes to maximize her pleasure, guys!

Viagra
The common name for Sildenafil Citrate, a medication that helps prevent loss of erection. But don’t take too much—walking around with a perma-boner the next three days could be "viagra-vating." (Hey, I'm gonna use this joke in my stand-up act—please don’t steal it.)

Vibrator
A thing that vibrates. Duh! It’s in the name! Do I have to do all the work for you?

Congratulations! You now know absolutely everything you need to know about (Get ready! Here it comes! The last word of the piece!) sex.

Follow Eli Braden on Twitter.

This is the Kentucky Fried Chicken keyboard and mouse (technically a chicken) created by KFC in Japan as part of some sort of social media promotion. Apparently somebody is going to win all these peripherals by tweeting a special hashtag or something. Then they will immediately go up for auction on eBay where they belong. Eventually, someone who collects KFC memorabilia will buy it, and it will become one of the highlights of their collection, second only to the giant spinning chicken bucket from one of the old signs and a tuft of the Colonel's beard. Keep going for as hot of the fried chicken USB drive. Thanks to Rodney, who informed me he could really go for a couple KFC biscuits right now.

In news that shouldn't surprise anybody who's familiar with Florida, a woman whose parents seriously named her Cherries Waffles Tennis was arrested in Miami after trying to use a fraudulent credit card to buy, among other things, a $400 spear gun. Thankfully, she and her accomplices were apprehended before they did whatever the hell they were going to do with that spear gun.

Cherries Waffles Tennis, 19, Vincent Mitchell, 19, and Paul Miller, 22, walked into Ground Swell Surf Shop on Donald Ross Road trying to buy two Ray Ban sunglasses worth $500 and a $100 GoPro camera. Tennis asked the clerk to punch in the credit-card number instead of swiping it. The clerk became suspicious and declined the sale, according to an arrest report made public Wednesday. The suspects then entered Scuba Works on U.S. 1 south of Indiantown Road in Jupiter and bought a $400 spear gun. They bought a GoPro camera from Kite Paddle Wake, at U.S 1 and South Beach Road, the report said. Police said they spotted the suspects as they were leaving a gas station. Cherries Tennis told police that her aunt gave her a credit card to use but did not know where it was when police asked.

So they managed to score a spear gun and a GoPro camera. That sounds like a recipe for disaster. What the hell were they going to do, film themselves robbing an underwater branch of the First Bank of Atlantis? Freeze, fish-people, this is a stickup! God willing, they would have all been eaten by the shark security guards. Thanks to E V I L A R E S, who agrees she does kind of look like a Cherries Waffles Tennis.

Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

It wasn’t so long ago that the world’s eager young masturbators could happily jerk themselves into a state of exhaustion without a care in the world. But now there's a growing level of consciousness of something that should probably have been quite obvious to anyone whose blood hadn’t all been redirected away from his brain. Namely, that if you watch tons of videos of unlimited genres of depravity, you’re going to find it more difficult to get turned on by a living, breathing, naked human being who wants to do IRL sex stuff with you. If watching someone stick their big toe into someone’s asshole feels normal to you, for instance, you might find making out kind of boring.

One of the people who can be credited for raising this point is Gary Wilson. His site, yourbrainonporn.com, has been at the forefront of efforts to understand what porn is doing to many of its users. Now, he's turned all his knowledge into a book, Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction.

I called Gary to discuss his new book and the issue of porn addiction facing millions of young onanism enthusiasts around the world.

VICE: So the main premise of your book is that you can either watch porn or have sex, but you can't have both. Is that right?
Gary Wilson: It is of course possible to have both. But for some guys it is difficult to have both. With internet porn some men are having not only erectile dysfunction (ED) but they're also having other sexual symptoms such as inability to orgasm, delayed ejaculation, declining libido with real partners, loss of attraction to real partners, and also very commonly their sexual taste—at least in porn—have morphed into something which is strange and upsetting for them.

Can you watch some porn and still have a healthy sex life? Is there a safe level?
Watching porn will always affect you. How much it will affect you is hard to say. So in other words we have seen guys who are terribly addicted, and it has deeply affected their sex lives. They need a year or more off porn in order to get a real erection with a real partner. So that’s an extreme occurrence. On the other end of the spectrum however you will have some guys with a girlfriend and they will watch porn a couple of times a week. But here’s the deal. You don’t know how much it affects you until you remove the variables. So these guys will just do a challenge and say, “OK I’ll stop watching porn,” and what they find is that they will still get benefits. And the benefits that they’ll get is that real sex is far more exiting. Their wife or girlfriend looks a lot better. They didn’t think that porn was affecting them but once they quit they found out that it was. Essentially porn has a broad spectrum of effects.

Porn has been around for generations in varying forms. What has caused the rise in issues like ED? Is it simply a case of faster and faster internet speeds?
It’s definitely escalated over the past few years. Firstly, the delivery system of the internet has caused this escalation. Secondly, however, adolescents as a result have complete access to hardcore streaming videos as soon as they desire it. But the question we have to ask is why the internet is so appealing? Think about Facebook. There are studies that show Facebook causes addiction. It can cause brain changes that mirror the brain changes that occur in drug addicts. In fact there are 70 internet-brain studies showing that. And what can occur with the internet is that is raises arousal and dopamine levels. Dopamine powers this reward circuit and the internet is unique in this sense. Clicking on new pictures, new words, sending messages, receiving messages becomes a novelty which raises dopamine levels in the reward circuit. So does surprise, shock, and anxiety. If you combine that with sexual stimulation, the highest arousal available, and put it in front of a teenager via a tube site with hardcore videos, adolescents can maintain this kind of arousal and dopamine levels. You can train your brain to need that level of stimulus in order to be sexually exited. When you’re watching these videos of real people having so called “real” sex it completely replaces their imagination. You no longer imagine what it's like. You become a voyeur watching all this action rather than with a still picture imagining the action you can create.

In the book you discuss a disconnect between younger and older generations, which translates into typically younger people being exposed to porn far more than say those who grew up with magazines. Is this simply a general rule, or is there some crossover?
When you look at studies you get a completely different view. People ages 14 to 25 have a much higher use of porn than adults and of course the use goes down as the age goes up. A recent UK poll showed that the vast majority of people believed watching porn has negative effects, so their view is based on their experience as say an 18-year-old growing up over the past few years and seeing the effect it has had upon them.

What do you say to those sexologists who want to dismiss the argument that porn can cause ED?
Well, they’re wrong. Prominent urologists are starting to write articles about it. On top of that we’ve had two brain studies from Cambridge University and one from the Max Planck institute. The Cambridge one found the same kind of brain changes that occur with drug addicts and 60 percent of those subjects suffered from issues such as ED and loss of libido. The German study correlated the hours of porn use a week and the years of porn use with firstly the structure of the reward circuits. They found a correlation suggesting that those who watch porn actually have less gray matter. In addition those who had been watching porn for years had less activation of the reward circuits. So their conclusion was that more porn use correlated with a decrease in gray matter and less sexual arousal. And these were non-addicts. Many sexologists claim that porn “addiction” (they don’t even refer to it as addiction) is caused by a high libido, which you are somehow born with. But these studies counter that and show that heavy porn users have lower sexual desire causing in turn issues such as ED. So it goes against that myth, which has no truth to it.

Gary's widely viewed TED talk

You talk about the need for more education in your conclusion regarding sex conditioning and the issue of porn addiction. Will education really stop people from wanting to watch porn?
Will it stop people from watching porn? No. But what occurs is that many of the guys who eventually showed up on all these forums had no idea that porn use could cause the problems they had developed such as severe ED. This young generation sees porn use and masturbation as synonymous. They read articles claiming that masturbation is good and so they assume that must mean that porn is good. They never make the connection. So if there were education that makes the connection, that would be good. What’s missing as well is that sexologists don’t make the connection between porn and the adolescent brain, which undergoes a process of rewiring in order to reproduce. A highly malleable adolescent brain has much higher surges of dopamine and is seeking thrills and novelty, which create a bigger buzz for them.

You discuss the idea of "rebooting" by not watching porn. How effective is this? Is it easy to cure a porn addiction?
Rebooting refers to removing all sexual stimuli. There are different motivations, such as ED and loss of sexual stimulation. Some guys are doing it for other reasons. They notice friends on forums are quitting ending up with far more motivation, confidence, and concentration. So these guys have a different barometer of when they feel they are rebooted. Guys suffering from sexual dysfunction aged between 40 to 50 who grew up consuming porn through magazines are now developing ED having switched to Tube sites. Young guys often need much longer to reboot compared to older guys. Older guys can take eight to 12 weeks and be fine after that. Some of these young guys, aged 20 to 24, take up to two years to fully recover. These guys are at their peak of health and levels of testosterone and they take a lot longer. This links back to the use of porn in adolescence when the brain is incredibly malleable.  

Do the issues that guys experience from porn addiction transfer over to women?
Guys typically use porn far more often. By cycling through the usernames of people on forums such as NoFap what we find is that woman often simply don’t get exited by their partners. They needed porn to have an orgasm, they weren’t lubricating, and they were addicted. So women do experience similar problems. The difference however is that men have a barometer, which is their penis. Women don’t. So many women grow up not relating these problems to porn use.

What stage do you feel we are at when it comes to knowledge about the effect porn has on the brain?   
There is a huge divide, and actually a degree of animosity when it comes to studying the effects of porn addiction on the human brain. What we’ve learned is that addiction, thanks to the work of real neuroscientists, is by far the most studied mental condition. It’s been induced in animals for the last 30 years looking right down to the molecular and genetic level where brain changes occur. And we’ve compared it to the many types of addiction that occur in humans. So there is a huge body of evidence. On the other side you have the sexology groups who don’t study the mechanisms of the brain and whom are sociologists primarily carrying out questionnaires. They have a model within which they don’t want porn addiction to be recognized, as they are afraid that if you say porn use has negative effects then it’s labeled as sex negative. And they don’t want any shame associated with sexuality. Conceptually that’s OK to a certain degree, but what they don’t acknowledge is that porn is now sex negative and screen positive.

What is your view on the existence of websites, which only contain “good porn” and filter out what is described as “bad” porn?
It’s a trend that really bothers me. It’s a trend that tries to teach people the difference between “good” porn and “bad” porn, as if there’s such a thing. This idea is put forth by websites such as makelovenotporn.com and that’s fine except that you pay for it and of course no young person is ever going to pay for porn. But beyond that is the idea that some 15-year-old kid is going to say “Oh, I’ve been told that this website has good porn so I’ll just stay on this website.” Now that is ridiculous. That’s like taking a 15-year-old boy to the grocery store and saying “Buy whatever you want, just buy good food.” They’re not going to go and buy broccoli. Instead they are going to start clicking on the grossest and strangest stuff because that’s what teenage boys do. So of course it wouldn’t work. But on top of that what counts as “bad” porn? Is it BDSM, female domination, or anal? That’s a never-ending argument. It can never be solved and it doesn’t address the basic problem, which is that young men and woman are training their sexual arousal to high speed internet, clicking, and novelty. It’s the delivery system that really makes the difference in 2014.

Orac post-publication note: There is reason to believe that one point I made below could well be incorrect. However, even leaving that point out, there are still many reasons to doubt the authenticity of the text exchange I discuss below. See the first 10 comments for a discussion. Unlike AoA and other antivaccine groups, if I am wrong about something, I will admit it and discuss what might have led me to an incorrect conclusion. Oh, and I missed something obvious (see comment #11). D’oh!

There’s something that’s been bothering me the last couple of days. I tried not to blog about it, but the more I looked at it the more it bugged me. It didn’t help that it’s also about this whole “CDC whistleblower” issue that’s been consuming about 90% of this blog’s posts for the last two weeks, thus risking tiring my readership (not to mention me) of the whole topic. So, when I noticed what I noticed, I sat back and waited, hoping that someone else would write about it, so that I wouldn’t have to. So far, as far as I can tell, no one has. I even hinted about it on Twitter, but no one took the bait. So here we are, once again, revisiting the story of CDC senior scientist William W. Thompson, who apparently helped biochemical engineer turned incompetent antivaccine pseudo-epidemiologist Brian Hooker produce an execrable “reanalysis” of one of a paper on the safety of the MMR vaccine on which Thompson was a co-author ten years ago that allegedly showed that there was an increased risk of autism in African-American males. It didn’t. For all his trouble Thompson was “outed” as the “CDC whistleblower” by Andrew Wakefield in an incredibly vile video likening this “deception” to the Tuskegee syphilis program and the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot all rolled into one in a piece de resistance of race baiting combined with Godwin. Later, Thompson issued a statement that is being trumpeted as “proof” that the “CDC lied,” when it is nothing of the sort.

The latest salvo from the antivaccine crank contingent came two days ago, when HIV/AIDS denialist Celia Farber published on her “Truthbarrier” website an article entitled BREAKING NEWS: CDC WHISTLEBLOWER TEXT MESSAGES TO ANDY WAKEFIELD: STUDY WOULD HAVE “SUPPORTED HIS SCIENTIFIC OPINION.” In it there was a grainy photo of what is purported to be an iPhone screen with the following text exchange:

A bigger version can be found here. (Why waste my benevolent overlords’ bandwidth by hosting a 4.6 MB file, when I can host a small version of it and waste Farber’s instead if you want to see the full size version?) In any case, here’s the alleged exchange:

AJW: “Is the press release real?”

WT: “Yes”

AJW: Thank you. This was the right and honorable thing to do. Andy.

WT: I agree. I apologize again for the price you paid for my dishonesty.

AJW: I forgive you complete and without any bitterness.

WT: I know you mean it and am grateful to know you more personally.

Although there is no text exchange shown, it is also claimed that Thompson texted Andrew Wakefield’s wife Carmel on August 20, saying:

I do believe your husbands career was unjustly damaged and this study would have supported his scientific opinion. Hopefully I can help repair it.

One notes, however, that there are no visuals of this particular text. One wonders why.

In any event, it all sounds damning, doesn’t it? Thompson actually apologized for everything to Andy and his wife? If true, it would indicate to me that Thompson was—shall we say?—less than sincere when he issued his press release in which he stated that Brian Hooker had recorded their conversations without his knowledge and that Andrew Wakefield had released his name without his permission, given that this text exchange is supposed to have come from the evening of August 27, which is the day that Thompson’s press release was issued. Having spoken to William Thompson’s lawyer, Rick Morgan, on Friday, I figured I’d send him an e-mail asking if he could confirm or deny whether his client ever had such an exchange. I figured that he’d be annoyed if his client were communicating with Wakefield after having issued that press release or would be anxious to deny the authenticity of the exchange if not. Rick Morgan never responded. I presume he had gotten whatever message he had wanted to get to me and then, not needing me any more, decided to ignore future communications. He’s a lawyer. I expect little else.

But something about that text exchange, more specifically the image of that text exchange, bothered me. It even bothered some antivaccinationists, because I saw complaints about it. Why is it a photo of an iPhone? Doesn’t Andy even know how to take a screen shot on his iPhone? (Just press the Home and Sleep buttons at the same time and release. There’ll be a fake camera shutter noise, and you’ll have a screenshot. So, not long after, a real-seeming screenshot appeared:

Better, right? (The full size original is here.) Well, no. Something kept bothering me about this screenshot. Something didn’t look right. No, it wasn’t necessarily just that there were apparently 130 unread text messages still on Wakefield’s phone, as indicated by the number 130 in parentheses. (Either Wakefield doesn’t check his texts that often, or he’s got a lot of groupies he communicates with.) It was something else. Something odd. So I looked at my own iPhone. Then I looked at this screenshot. Then I looked at my iPhone again. The iPhone in the screenshot is clearly running some version of iOS 7, as is mine. Then it hit me. Take a look at this part of Wakefield’s screen shot, the top of the screen:

Now take a look at the same header from mine. (I blocked out the name of the person texting me.) Notice any difference? Take another look:

Now, do you notice the difference? I did? Notice how in Andy’s screenshot, the word “Back” appears by the arrow in the upper left hand corner. Notice how, in mine, the word “Messages” appears in the upper left hand corner. That’s what had been bugging me when I first looked at the screenshot and it didn’t look quite right to me! I had finally put my finger on it!

So does this anomaly mean that these text messages are faked? I don’t know. That’s why I waited two days to say anything about it. I was asking around to see if there were any versions of iOS 7 that displayed the word “Back” instead of “Messages” to indicate going back to the main list in the Messages app. (Maybe the UK version of iOS used “Back” instead of “Messages,” although Wakefield’s lived in Austin so long that I highly doubt he’d have a UK-sold iPhone or, if he did, that Thompson would be texting it. Oh, wait. Nope.) I couldn’t find any, but, even though I’m a pretty major Apple fanboi in many respects and have used an iPhone since I got the very first iPhone a few months after it had been released (I waited until my previous contract was up), I don’t claim encyclopedic knowledge of the iPhone. I could be wrong, and I’m sure one of you in the comments will tell me so if I am. If I’m not wrong, to me this anomaly strongly suggests that this screenshot in which Thompson allegedly “apologizes” to Andrew Wakefield is a fake.

Of course, even if the screenshot isn’t a “fake” (in that it was created on one of those text message generator apps or something like that), it could still be a fake, if you know what I mean. All it would take to make a “real” screenshot that is in reality faked would be for Andy to put a friend’s iPhone number into his Contacts app, give that contact the name “William,” and then have that friend text Wakefield whatever texts Wakefield wanted him to, to create the exchange. We have nothing other than Celia Farber’s and, apparently, Andrew Wakefield’s word (given that Wakefield Tweeted a link to Farber’s article) for it that this is really William Thompson texting him, and, as we’ve learned from his long history, anyone who relies on Wakefield’s word alone for anything is taking a huge risk of being burned.

So in the end, we’re left with three possibilities. First, this text exchange might legitimate, all the anomalies of not using a proper screenshot at first and “Back” instead of “Messages” appearing in the upper left hand corner notwithstanding. I doubt this possibility very much, because, for all his foolishness, naivete, and gullibility Thompson appears to be honest to a fault and his having communicated with Wakefield after accusing him of “outing” him without his permission would imply that Thompson was less than truthful—to put it mildly!—in his press release. Also, I doubt very much that his lawyer would be happy with his having communicated with Wakefield in a manner that could be publicized; my guess is that Morgan has Thompson under very strict instructions not to communicate with Brian Hooker, Andrew Wakefield, or anyone associated with them. Even if that weren’t the case, why would Thompson, having been burned once, give Wakefield a chance to burn him again? If Thompson really did communicate with Wakefield after becoming his client, I can see Rick Morgan tearing his hair out over the extreme stupidity of the move. Still, given Thompson’s past behavior, this possibility cannot be entirely discounted.

The other two possibilities are either that this screenshot was faked (which seems possible, although I could be mistaken, given that, despite extensive Googling I haven’t been able to find a screenshot that uses “Back” instead of “Messages” my search is not comprehensive) or that Wakefield faked a text exchange and made it appear to be someone named “William,” the implication being that that’s William Thompson, something that is incredibly easy to do. All you need is a friend with an iPhone to do it. There’s no concrete evidence to argue for or against this last possibility, but I also note that there’s no concrete evidence (just Farber’s and apparently Wakefield’s word) that the screenshot represents a real text exchange between William Thompson and Andrew Wakefield, either. That doesn’t even take into account the content of the text exchange, which is bizarre and stilted, to say the least. Even if it is real, it’s no doubt highly cherry picked.

Whatever the true case, this whole “CDC whistleblower” thing just keeps getting stranger and stranger. Now can the developments stop for a day so that I can write about something else tomorrow?