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Last night I quit Jezebel. It sounds like a dumb thing to be writing about, but for me, it's really, really significant.

I'm 23. I'm black. I'm West Indian. I didn't have a lot of exposure to feminism growing up. I cringe when I recall the things that I said about other women when I was a freshman in college, and the attitudes that I had towards sexuality and womanhood. I went to a Catholic school in a country that is still largely misogynistic. It was pretty much a given that I'd grown up to be an anti-woman little shit.

But then I found Jezebel. I found Jezebel and I started reading. I'm the kind of person who just likes to know things, so perusing the site pre-Kinja was like a revelation to me. All of a sudden I had this entire vocabulary to explain the little microagressions that I'd faced all my life, and a community of women who were engaged in parsing those issues. I could finally vocalize why I felt an inconsolable rage when I was tone policed. I knew how to defend myself against slut shaming. I could explain in detail why rape culture was so insidious and why restrictions on reproductive freedom were a devastating step backwards for women.

Jezebel taught me how to be a woman.
And then it taught me that it didn't care about the kind of woman that I am.

In a weird way, it feels like being betrayed by a trusted friend. I've been a regular on Jezebel since my junior year of college in 2010, and a fervent feminist ever since. But little by little I could see that there wasn't much consideration for a feminism that included the diversity of women. There was a blatant disregard for the difference in perspective that WoC have in relation to various issues by virtue of their different experiences of the world.

And then Kinja happened, and I was locked out of Groupthink during the switchover. I finally got posting privileges in July 2013. And then Solidarity Is For White Women happened and I talked about it. And Jezebel ignored it. So I talked about it some more.

In the three months since I've had posting privileges, all of the following have happened:

1. Solidarity Is For White Women called out Jezebel's complicity in allowing H. Schwyzer to become a prolific voice in online feminism, despite his continued abuse of WoC.
2. Instead of apologizing for their mistake or even acknowledging the situation in any way, Jessica Coen wrote a satirical post about the stages of grief, effectively trying to absolve herself of any responsibility.
3. When Jezebel did finally acknowledge SIFWW, rather than take the opportunity to address their role in the situation, they simply aggregated tweets without context, and then forgot to mention the WoC who started the hashtag.
4. Then Miley at the VMA's happened. And instead of talking about both the way that Miley was needlessly slut shamed and the way in which Miley's performance perpetuated racist narratives, they ignored the racist aspects of her performance altogether.
5. Pissed, I tackled it myself, and then Miley-Gate happened, and they ignored that too, instead choosing to recycle and old piece of one of the few WoC on staff, and tacking on the name of the white EIC.
6. And yesterday, a month later, they published a piece that made light of and mocked Chris Brown's admission that he had lost his virginity to a much older girl when he was eight. That's right. They diminished the fact that Chris Brown was RAPED AS A CHILD, because flagellating the misbehaving black man is more important than sympathy and support for a rape victim.

Three months. Three MONTHS! That's how many times Jezebel has majorly fucked up in three months. And it started to feel like I was just banging my head against a brick wall. It was getting pretty clear that Jessica Coen & Co. didn't care about the commentariat said and why should they? Jezebel isn't about feminism, or change, or making a difference. It's about page views and clicks. It's about money. "Corporate Feminism" at its finest. If it helps them hit their numbers, they're going to continue to troll the very readers that make their success possible. I refuse to be part of it anymore. Jezebel has become like that toxic friend you keep around out of nostalgia for the days when things were better. Fuck that. Time to cut the fat.

I know that Jessica Coen will likely never see this, and if she does she won't give a shit, but I sincerely hope she gets her shit together. I know that Jezebel likes to pass the buck and claim that they aren't technically a feminist site, but it is staffed by women who identify as feminist. And if they're as feminist as they claim to be, none of this stuff would be acceptable. So this is me calling you out Jessica. Get your shit the fuck together. Make some changes. Expand your perspective. Improve. Do better. Either do that, or never tackle another feminist issue on Jezebel ever again. Feminism isn't situational. Either you're feminist or you're not. Right now, you're not, but you keep pretending to be. Stop it.

It'll be hard to just drop Jezebel cold turkey, especially since it's my main source for feminist news (maybe that was the problem!) but I'll survive. As I said last night:

"I'm not letting them make any more money off my page views. I'm not enabling them to keep demonstrating that people who look like me are worthless to them. [...] It genuinely hurts me to feel like a space that is supposed to be feminist and inclusive, continuously rejects intersectionality and routinely reasserts the hierarchy of privilege. I'm not game for that."

So instead of spending all my time trying to strike back at Jezebel's bullshit, I'm going to get my own shit together. I'm gonna get back to my photography and I'm going to start spending more time on feminist websites that actually understand what feminism should be. Because they exist. There are spaces on the internet that allow diverse voices to be heard. Here's to signal boosting:

One of the interesting things about Marvel Comics is how seamlessly they integrated horror characters into their mainstream universe. A lot of that, of course, is just convenience. Marvel is, after all, a superhero publisher, so even when they do a comic about Dracula or, say, an actual demon from Hell who runs around with his head on fire punishing sinners with his supernatural abilities, they still just treat them like superheroes that are just part of this bigger, weirder world.

As a result, while they might all get lumped in together, they never really stay cooped up in some spooky corner, and if you’re the type to dive into the quarter bin to look for a few cheap scares, that makes it pretty easy to find a spoooooky Halloween back issue. Sometimes Dracula shows up in X-Men and hits on Storm for two issues. Sometimes Blade joins a team of British heroes and helps fight aliens. And sometimes… sometimes Spider-Man gets kidnapped and strapped to a table with Frankenstein so that some weirdo you’ve never heard of can make “MONSTER SUPREME.”

That particular adventure is a titanic two-parter that runs through Marvel Team-Up #36 and 37, from the creative team of the legendary Gerry Conway, Sal Buscema and the supervillain himself, Vince Colletta, and it is a good one. Long-time CA readers may recall that I’m a huge fan of books like Marvel Team-Up just on principle — by teaming someone up with virtually anyone else from the same company over the course of 150 issues, you not only show how adaptable they can be to different kinds of stories, you help to build that adaptability, too. There are a lot of good reasons why Spider-Man (MTU) Batman (Brave and the Bold) and the Thing (Marvel Two-In-One) are some of the best characters in comics, but being able to see them do just about anything there is to do is one of the big ones.

That said, Spider-Man’s not exactly that far from a horror character to begin with. Don’t get me wrong, he’s planted pretty firmly in the superhero camp, but he also skitters around with his weird psychic spider powers and has an origin that reads like an issue of Tales From the Crypt. That’s another thing he has in common with the Thing (you know, the rock monster?) and Batman (you know, the guy who dresses in a Dracula cape with devil horns?), but here, Conway and Buscema bring it right to the forefront.

And they had to, because when Colletta’s around, you can’t really keep anything in the background. Heyo!

Our story opens with Spider-Man swinging in to stop a pair of run-of-the-mill crooks who just robbed a bank, and to be honest, it’s not exactly his finest moment. Sure, he’s doing whatever a spider can, which in this case means cracking jokes about encounter groups while also cracking jaws…

…but before he can actually web the crooks up and stick ‘em to a lamppost, he’s kayoed by a laser beam that comes from out of nowhere. One might think this is something that Spider-Sense would warn him about, and that’s a complaint with some pretty solid footing. On the other hand, it’s kind of hard to argue the finer points of Spider-Man with the guy who, you know, wrote the death of Gwen Stacy. Point is, the crooks decide not to press their luck by shooting Spider-Man in the face while he’s knocked out, and instead make the smart choice to vamoose before the Punisher shows up to make this a team-up.

When he wakes up, our spidery hero has been strapped to a table next to Frankenstein’s monster…

…which, to be honest, is nowhere near the worst place a dude who runs around Manhattan in a skintight outfit referring to himself as a “swinger” has ever woken up.

Before moving on, I just want to take a moment to talk about how great this page is. Spider-Man wakes up quippy, which isn’t a surprise, but it’s basically amazing that his first instinct on regaining consciousness is to try workshopping a Don Rickles routine on a gigantic monster that is also tied down next to him. Seriously! Dude goes straight for insult comedy, but the best thing is that Frankenstein completely no-sells it. “Where did you escape from” being met with “I’m tied up, you idiot, I obviously haven’t escaped from anything” is the kind of ice cold shutdown that I think we all dream of. Between that and Spidey calling Frankenstein “Patches” on the cover, these two oughtta take this act on the road.

So just who’s behind the abduction and subsequent bondaging?

It’s Baron Ludwig von Shtupf — The Monster Maker! And that, friends is the type of truly unfortunate name that drives someone to a life of supervillainy. As you might expect, he plants to shtupf things up for everyone, particularly Spider-Man and Frankenstein, but Parker is having absolutely none of it.

As though this issue was not already awesome, Conway and Buscema decide it’s time to remind the reader that Spider-Man can lift a car without much effort. Peter just cold straight-leg kicks von Shtupf across the room, busts out of the restraints, and then bails out the window with Frankenstein in tow.

From there, Spider-Man and Mr. Adam Frankenstein spend a little bit of time eluding von Shtupf’s ski troopers — he’s a Baron in the Marvel Universe, of course he has ski troopers — and swapping origin stories so that everyone knows where they stand. Eventually, though, they run across a young lady (also on skis) being menaced by those selfsame ski troopers. Obviously, Spidey and Frankenstein make short work of them, but when they go to help the lady, she gasses them Batman ’66 style, knocking them out and (presumably) hauling them back to her ski lodge.

So for those of you keeping score at home, this is a comic where the hero has been knocked unconscious twice by page 12. I don’t think even Jack Knight beat that record.

Fortunately for Spidey’s dignity, he didn’t just get knockout-gassed by a snow bunny. It turns out that she’s Klemmer: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.!

Let me know if she shows up on that new TV show and starts talking about MONSTER SUPREME (which is like a regular monster, but with sour cream and guacamole). And really, if that doesn’t happen, what are we even doing here?

Anyway, Klemmer has been dispatched to take down von Cuss herself, and what’s more, she wants to do it spy style, as a secret operation. She has decided to pressgang the heroes into helping her out, but in the name of subtlety, she decides that Frankenstein has to sit this one out. One more time, for those of you in the back, she has decided that this operation needs subtlety, so she’s taking Spider-Man, the chatterbox in the red and blue luchador suit.

Amazingly, it does not go well.

Sure, things work okay when Spider-Man is just hanging ski troopers by their jaws (which looks extremely painful) and when Frankenstein busts in and starts slapping dudes around with the sound effect “WHAT,” but it turns out that the Baron had a secret weapon this entire time:

The mothercussing Man-Wolf. You know, J. Jonah Jameson’s son the astronaut who became a werewolf when he went to the moon and who is sometimes the Stargod of Other-Realm, with completely non-werewolf-based powers? Yeah, that guy shows up.

Before long, Man-Wolf and the Monster Maker overcome Spider-Man and Frankenstein and strap them down yet again, and this is where the story goes 100% cuckoo bananas as we learn the Baron’s plan:

He’s going to create Spider-Frankenstein-Wolfmans. How is this guy not Marvel’s most popular villain? I mean, we had an entire movie about stupid Justin Hammer, and Baron von Shtupf, the Monster Maker gets nothin’. Maybe he shows up in that Baywatch Nights episode Conway wrote…

Anyway, you may be asking yourself “but what about Agent Klemmer?” and really, you are about to wish you hadn’t. She escapes from the castle, but the Baron sends Man-Wolf out in hot pursuit. Unfortunately for Klemmer, she winds up trapped between Man-Wolf and a bunch of regular wolves, and…

No. No no no nononononono.

Some other stuff happens, but I’ll just jump ahead here and let you know that Klemmer distracts Man-Wolf by asking for dinner and then scrams, leaving him alone to quote Alpha 5:

CUT TO: The castle, where Frankenstein and Spider-Man free themselves with von Shtupf’s vivisection laser, then go to find the Baron himself. And really, while he has pretty grand plans for world domination via Spider-Frankenstein-Wolfmans, he walks straight into the biggest rookie mistake I think I’ve ever seen. Not only dodes this dude walk away trusting his automated device to dispose of the heroes, he then takes a nap.

And that’s pretty much that. Oh, except that Spider-Man and Man-Wolf get into a fistfight where Conway references their “instincts of malehood” that drive them to punch each other over a woman.

It’s… less than ideal.

Some of the men indicted last week for allegedly taking part in the scores of denial-of-service attacks launched by hacktivist group Anonymous during 2010 don't fit the stereotype of a pajamas-wearing teen hacker causing havoc from mom's basement.

For example, The Verge has learned that defendant Phillip Simpson is a 28-year-old IT professional who works for a test-preparation service. Anthony Tadros, 22, is a student at the University of Connecticut, who ironically worked as a security analyst for the school, according to his LinkedIn profile. Geoffrey Commander is 65-years old. And then there's Ryan Gubele, a 27-year-old who is a former contract employee for Amazon. In June, Gubele began working as a site reliability engineer for Twitter — and is currently still employed there.

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"It's in my best interest not to answer any questions."

Last week, the US Department of Justice alleged in a 28-page indictment that Gubele and the other 12 defendants helped Anonymous, the hacktivist collective, cause the collapse or disruption of web sites operated by Bank of America, MasterCard and multiple global antipiracy groups. Some of the companies were attacked for refusing to process donations made to WikiLeaks, the group that published leaked US diplomatic cables. Others came under fire for supporting antipiracy efforts. Anonymous dubbed the DDoS campaign Operation Payback.

In the indictment, federal prosecutors allege that it was Gubele who aided Anonymous by tracking the effectiveness of the group's attacks on the Motion Picture Association of America, the trade group for the Hollywood studios. They also accuse him of illegally accessing computer systems of at least one of the targets during Operation Payback, which occurred between September 2010 and January 2011. The indictment doesn't say whether Gubele played any role in the attack on Amazon in December 2010. According to Gubele's LinkedIn profile, he began working for the retailer in August 2010 and left the same month that Operation Payback concluded.

Gubele and Simpson did not respond to interview requests. Twitter and Amazon declined to comment. Tadros, the security analyst, said in a text: "It's in my best interest not to answer any questions about my situation while the case is ongoing."

Feds likely want to send a message US law enforcement has begun cracking down on computer crime and appears to be making an extra effort to track Anonymous members, who consider themselves activists for social change and come from all over the globe. During the past decade, the group has hacked or launched denial of service attacks against the Church of Scientology, numerous governments, Sony, the New York Stock Exchange and sites hosting child porn. While numerous arrests have been made, the percentage of Anonymous members tried for computer offenses is believed to be a tiny fraction of the group’s potential members. Nonetheless, the US government likely wants to send a message.

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Sherlock Holmes (r) and Dr. John H. Watson. Illustration by Sidney Paget.

That little 2013/07 is interesting because it points us back to an earlier edition of RDA that didn’t include a rule for fictitious characters, non-human entities, other important designations that can distinguish a person. Holmes’ new authority record was created on July 16, 2013 (according to OCLC Connexion). So did the rule change after his record was created? But even still, if the rule changed why did LoC move ahead with editing the authority record one of the most influential fictitious characters in western literature?

To make it even more confusing, there’s no trace of the non-preferred access point in the new authority record. So, based on this new authority record, how are people supposed to know that Sherlock Holmes in in fact not a real male who enjoys bee culture and criminology? They can’t, and that’s just confusing. At least Harry Potter and Count Dracula are still fictitious…but for how long?! If we follow RDA closely, we could soon have Potter, Harry (Wizard) and Dracula, Count (Vampire)!

I’d love to hear what you think about the loss of Fictitious characters in our authority file! Please post your comments. Until this all gets sorted out, I’m going to keep Holmes in our catalog just as he is – fictitious.

This Charming Charlie, the Tumblr that rose to prominence earlier this year for juxtaposing angst-ridden Smiths lyrics with Peanuts strips, has overcome its copyright troubles with Universal. The site received a trio of takedown notices from Universal last month for using Morrissey-Smiths lyrics, which led some to condemn the label and claim Smiths frontman Morrissey was a "fun vampire." Morrissey answered the accusations noting that he is no longer represented by Universal, although the label does jointly own the rights to some of the artist's back catalogue.

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Morrissey is 'delighted and flattered' by the strip

In a statement given to Morrissey fan site True to you, the artist says he is "delighted and flattered by the Peanuts comic strip with its use of Morrissey-Smiths lyrics," adding that he "hopes that the strips remain." Without Morrissey's support, it would be difficult for Universal to file a full lawsuit against the strip. This Charming Charlie creator Lauren LoPrete has now informed the world that the label has decided to not pursue things further, with her lawyer adding that Morrissey's "generous approval removes any litigation threat."

On her Tumblr, LaPrete writes that she's "deeply honored that Morrissey spoke out on behalf of This Charming Charlie, although not surprised." Noting that Morrissey is "not a stranger to fair use," LaPrete says she's "glad he is able to see the humor in all of this, even if lawyers could not." She hopes that "this example will set a precedent for copyright laws in the future, and encourage others to express themselves and enrich our culture through free speech, parody and social critique."

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Harvard Art Museums

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