Text And Drive is a browser-based driving simulator with the added complication of a plot told through textual communication. Like the protagonists of a GTA game, you’ll be committing crime from behind the wheel as you navigate through the traffic on a crowded bridge while trying to reply to texts that become increasingly urgent. I expected a sorrowful ART GAME, the sort of thing that would set itself up as an installation in my browser while sad piano music tinkled out of my headphones like the whisper of a melancholy cherub. Text And Drive is a smart piece of design though, a plate-spinning exercise in cursor control.
Taylor Swift and Ina Garten recently became fast friends, and it's all thanks to Food Network Magazine!
The "Sweeter Than Fiction" singer, 24, and the Barefoot Contessa host, 66, teamed up for the magazine's first-ever July/August Music Issue, on stands June 24. Taylor, who owns all of Ina's cookbooks, traveled from her Tribeca apartment in New York City to the Hamptons to meet the celebrity chef. Taylor invited her mother, Andrea Finlay, and brother, Austin Swift, to join her.
When the trio arrived, Ina was in the midst of slicing warm date bread and getting coffee ready for her guests. "Just another day at Barefoot Contessa," joked the TV personality, whose show debuted in 2002.
Taylor and Ina baked a mustard-roasted fish in the oven and spread whipped cream on a Pavlova, all while bonding over their mutual frustration for people who don't like to eat. "I'll cook for these boys, and they'll be like, 'I'm on a diet,'" the country crossover artist said. "I'm like, 'I can't hang out with you.'"
Ina then shared a similar story in which a guest claimed she was on a cleanse before downing an entire whiskey sour—and then had the gall to ask for another! "Oh, I've never had a whiskey sour," Taylor said.
As luck would have it, Ina had the ingredients on hand. "I have some in my refrigerator!" she told Taylor. "Hey, Andrea," the singer called. "Come over here. We're day-drinking!" (flop)
Andrea and Austin joined the duo and tasted Ina's favorite cocktail. The foursome then started spooning the Pavlova. "I don't always eat it this way," Ina said, laughing about their group decision to forgo plates.
During their impromptu sit-down lunch, Taylor invited her "hero" Ina to visit her home and see her perform one day. After they left, Ina looked around her kitchen and marveled, "Did that really happen?"
src are food posts a thing? whatever we're having one!!
“Weird Al” Yankovic will release his 13th solo album later this year. Mandatory Fun is out July 15 on RCA Records and is the parody artist’s first release since 2011’s Alpocalypse. There’s precious little information available about the contents of Fun, other than the fact that it contains a parody of Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” and a take on a band that Patton Oswalt cryptically says he’s “worshipped since the ’90s.”
Interestingly enough, this might be Yankovic’s last “album” album, since Mandatory Fun is the final LP due on his current contract with RCA. In a blog post last year, Yankovic wrote that he was “carefully weighing his options” about what to do next, saying he might switch to just releasing individual singles online, so as to stay more timely.
Just got done mastering. Ladies and gentlemen, here it is… my NEW ALBUM. pic.twitter ...
Emma hasn’t actually worn a costume in two years; she just uses her telepathy to make people think she is, when in actual fact she just runs around the battlefield wearing baggy PJs. She learnt the trick from Charles, who hasn’t worn clothes at all for the last decade using the same method.
While I think I prefer the glorious mashup of Brian Williams rapping "Gin and Juice," this Jimmy Fallon video of Brian doing Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" touches something in my primordial brain. AND I LIKE IT. (Touch it again!)
'Do not bro gently into that good night, fans. The Internet needs your defiant creativity'
nope
'Tara Strong, the voice of Twilight Sparkle, also had high praise:
They’re the best fanbase ever, they’re so hilarious'
nope
Frankly, I’m surprised it took this long: after four years of growing ubiquity, the good “Brony” name and all its accompanying fan-made creations may now be owned by Hasbro. Everyone put your hooves where I can see them and back away from Deviantart. Slowly.
Even before its recent legal woes, the brony moniker was already loaded with implications: everyone from Glenn Beck to adult-film star Tasha Reign has had strong opinions on My Little Pony‘s older fans. I’m not a brony, so I defer to any readers with insider insight: if you want to unpack the gender implications of the term, I’d be fascinated. Unfortunately, Hasbro probably would be, too.
According to blogger mandomommy (the mother of Andy “Mandopony” Stein, a musician known for his pony-themed songs) her recent interactions with Hasbro reveal the company may be putting legal constraints on one of its largest fan bases. Mandomommy says she attempted to upload a product from Zazzle with a “Brony” descriptive tag back in May, and received the following notice:
Hasbro, not Zazzle, requested the removal–an unprecedented and strange move considering the word “brony” was already copyrighted, technically. The name first appeared on 4chan on 10/23/10, just 13 days after the current My Little Pony reboot, Friendship is Magic, first aired.
According to Horse News, the word “brony” didn’t even appear in official Hasbro content until the show’s “Equestria Girls” song two years ago. Here the term refers just to males, rather than adult fans in general.
If Hasbro is claiming the term as intellectual property, what does that mean for the niche group that’s produced literal buttloads of original content under the brony name? The adult My Little Pony devotees are one of the most creative and influential fan bases out there, and helped make Friendship Is Magic the highest-rated original production in the Hub Network’s broadcast history. The brony influence has also not gone unnoticed by the show’s actors, who spoke about the phenomenon back in 2012. Said Tabitha St. Germain (or Rarity, for all you FIM fans):
These guys make videos and music and stories and astonishing art, and make whole worlds with it. I just think they’re awesome.
Tara Strong, the voice of Twilight Sparkle, also had high praise:
They’re the best fanbase ever, they’re so hilarious and supportive and creative and giving, they give so much to charity and they’re always there for us if we’re putting silly stuff on Twitter or if we’re raising money for charity.
Do not bro gently into that good night, fans. The Internet needs your defiant creativity, and yes, even the ensuing picture of Jesus cradling Rainbow Dash. Surely one of the Mane 6 has some kind of legal background?
Many modern action movies, including How To Train Your Dragon 2, are visibly trying to make their female characters more than trophies and …
This is a great article and required reading for all writers. It’s important that you’re not just checking a box for a “strong female character” and then leaving them with nothing to do. As I’ve said before, if you can replace your female character with a sexy lamp, you’re doing it wrong.
Early in June, Ars reported the discovery of Android/Simplocker, which appeared to be the first cryptographic ransomware Trojan targeted at Android devices. Simplocker encrypts photos, documents, and videos in devices’ local storage and then instructs the device owner to send money if they ever want to see that content again.
One researcher—Simon Bell, an undergraduate student at the University of Sussex—managed to dissect the code for Simplocker. He found that while the code actually called back to a command and control server over the Tor anonymizing network to pass information about the infected device, all of the encryption work was done by the malware itself.
Today, Bell released an antidote to Simplocker—a Java program that can decrypt the files attacked by the malware. “The antidote was incredibly easy to create because the ransomware came with both the decryption method and the decryption password,” Bell wrote. “Therefore producing an antidote was more of a copy-and-paste job than anything.”
A popular defense of the NCAA's model is to claim that changing it would mean schools would have to start giving athletes in men's and women's sports unequal treatment. However, this argument is disingenuous, because schools already give male athletes more financial benefits than female athletes.
In order to stay Title IX compliant, schools offer the same number of scholarships to men and women and make sure facilities are roughly similar for the two. But they don't spend the same amount on both genders.
On Tuesday, Texas director of women's athletics Chris Plonsky testified at the O'Bannon trial about this very issue.
Impact of TV $ for players on integration? Plonsky: "It would run counter to the equitable and balanced nature of our approach."
So let's check in on just how equitable Texas was in the numbers it presented to the Department of Education for the 2012-13 school year:
Despite only 51 percent of its athletes being men, Texas spent 58 percent of its athletic aid on men during the 2012-13 school year.
Texas reported $65,309,552 in men's and women's team expenses that year. 71 percent of the spending went to men's sports (about $27 million more than women's sports).
Texas spent $8 million more on football than all of its women's sports combined.
Numbers like these can be a bit off at times, because every school reports them differently. But generally, it's clear that Texas spends far more on its men's sports than its women's sports, just like every other major sports school.
Now you might respond that this is fair, since Texas made $127 million more on its men's sports than its women's sports in 2013. That's absolutely a valid point. And it's why Judge Claudia Wilken declared that football and men's basketball make up their own market within the athletic department. Thus, the funding of other sports is not a concern in the O'Bannon trial.
VentureBeat reports the seven-year-old viral media startup is raising some $200 million in its latest funding round, which puts the company on track to be one of the most highly valued new media properties in the industry.
“If BuzzFeed does raise $200 million, it’s more than likely that the valuation could approach the billion-dollar range, and it may very soon be New York City’s next member of the billion-dollar club,” said analyst Matthew Turlip, data firm PrivCo, which tracks privately held companies. (The Wall Street Journal’s running tally of billion-dollar-plus startup valuations doesn’t yet list BuzzFeed.)
Known for its blend of catchy, GIF-laden listicles and serious news, BuzzFeed would be raising more than 10 times its previous round of $19 million last year, when the company was valued at roughly $200 million. A quick chart of some other media startup funding rounds puts things in perspective:
Tap to expand image
A recent story by Quartz on other media company valuations also offers a good bit of context on where BuzzFeed ranks among its peers. VentureBeat points out that BuzzFeed boasts an audience of 130 million unique visitors, as of last November, but it also recently lost its longtime chief operating officer and president Jon Steinberg to the UK’s Daily Mail.
Raising a boatload of cash probably helps soothe the pain.
Modern infographs can be fun and fascinating, but when it comes to pure aesthetics, they've got nothing on the works of John Philipps Emslie, who mapped the Earth and the sky with an illustrator's flair.
Billy Idol will be doing a whole lot of dancing with himself come this fall. The ex-Generation X member has already announced the release of his autobiography, the aptly titled Dancing With Myself. Now he’s announced a new studio LP, his first original material in almost 10 years (not that anyone really remembers 2005’s Devil’s Playground). The as-yet-untitled record doesn’t have an official release date, but it’s expected to hit stores sometime around Oct. 7, when Idol’s book is due via the Simon & Schuster imprint Touchston. A new single should be out at some point this summer.
Texas women's athletic director Chris Plonsky testified at the O'Bannon trial on Tuesday and introduced a new description of those athletes who are trying to get a piece of the NCAA's revenue: entitlement.
Plonsky acknowledges her view is players asking for share is sense of "entitlement."
"I view these cases as being the result of the entitlement attitude we've created in our revenue sports. We now have threatening (student-athletes) -- many of whom, based on grad rates of the 80s and 90s, sucked a whole lot off the college athletics pipe -- and now want to buckle the system at the knees at the expense of today's (student-athletes.)"
Ironically, Plonsky said she was worried about the exploitation of athletes. She implied that the schools are the ones who need to protect them.
Isaacson: Is it your opinion that student-athletes should be protected from commercial exploitation? Plonsky: Yes, that's part of it.
Meanwhile, the Texas athletic department is the richest in college sports and has its own ESPN television channel. The athletic department reported to the Department of Education that it made over $81 million in profit off football last year, and $27 million in profit as a whole. However, due to NCAA rules, Longhorn athletes cannot market their athletic abilities.
A rendering of All Aboard Florida's rail station in downtown Miami. (All Aboard Florida)
MIAMI—Beginning in 2016, All Aboard Florida will run 32 departures a day between Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach, with service extending to Orlando.* With a maximum speed of 125 miles per hour, the trains will complete the 240-mile journey in less than three hours. In South Florida, around the three initial stations, the company will develop 4.2 million square feet of real estate. In Orlando, the terminus will be located at the airport and connect to a new commuter rail line at a sparkling, state-funded $215 million transportation hub.
It's a big project by any standard, but it looms even larger in historical context. No private intercity passenger rail line has operated in the United States in 30 years — and it has been longer still since a new service was introduced. "You'd have to go back over 100 years to find a significant investment in private intercity rail in the U.S.," says David Levinson, a transportation analyst at the University of Minnesota.
Broadly speaking, there are two reasons All Aboard Florida may be able to revive a transportation model whose decline began during the Hoover administration. The first might be called what is already there: a coastline's worth of right-of-way, half of Florida's population, and tens of millions of travelers on business and vacation. The second might be called what could be there: 15 acres* of transit-oriented development in three South Florida downtowns.
Can All Aboard Florida establish a blueprint for how private freight railways, which averted financial ruin by abandoning passenger service, can profit from its revival? "If it can work there, it could work in other markets. The other private rail firms absolutely can be watching this," says Adie Tomer, an associate at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program who studies passenger rail. "This a great test for America."
• • • • •
Private, inter-city passenger rail in America has been dead since 1983, the year the Rio Grande Zephyr, which ran through the Rockies between Denver and Ogden, Utah, was folded into Amtrak's California Zephyr route. That was the final bow of a long fifth act that began with the ascent of the American automobile six decades earlier. The number of passenger trains in the United States dropped 45 percent between 1929 and 1945, and 85 percent between 1929 and 1965.
Today America's passenger trains are operated publicly by Amtrak. Conceived as a political escape valve to relieve freight companies of the burden of passenger service, Amtrak was never expected to succeed, says Albert Churella, a historian of the Pennsylvania Railroad. "It was made very clear to everybody — wink wink, nudge nudge — that in a few years we're going to shut all this stuff down," he says. Amtrak has survived thanks to its political appeal and popularity, but not because it's good business; it receives more than a billion dollars in taxpayer subsidies each year.
All Aboard Florida, however, has a couple of inherent advantages. The first is in its infrastructure. As a corporate descendent of the Florida East Coast Railway, AAF owns an easement for passenger service on a long, centrally located, well-maintained freight corridor. The second is demographic. On the strength of Disney World, Universal Studios, and other theme parks, Orlando is the most visited city in the United States, with nearly 60 million tourists last year. Miami, with its global cachet and thriving cruise ship port, counted 14 million visitors in 2013. All Aboard says that there are 500 million trips made every year between its destination cities.
So AAF will set a passenger railway in motion. With 32 trips each day and a train capacity of 400 travelers, the service can theoretically carry more daily riders between Miami and Orlando than Amtrak's Acela does between New York and Washington, D.C. Tourists and in-state leisure travelers will account for nearly three-quarters of AAF ridership, with business travelers making up the rest. (It's virtually the inverse of the Acela's business-heavy traveler ratio.)
"Our expectation is that the train will be profitable, in and of itself," says John Guitar, senior vice president of business development at AAF.
It's a daunting goal. The Florida Fun Train, which ran between Fort Lauderdale and Tampa during the late 1990s, vastly overestimated tourist demand in the region and shuttered after less than a year of operation. A Congressional Research Service report estimates that ridership levels needed to justify the cost of high-speed rail start at 6 million annual riders. The maximum number of Miami-Orlando tickets that AAF can sell each year will be 4.7 million.
There is one place in America where passenger rail operates in the black. Amtrak's Acela and Northeast Regional trains, which serve the dense Boston-Washington megalopolis ands its population of 50 million, count 11.5 million annual riders between them. The Acela's operating surplus, the larger of the two, was $237 million in FY 2013.
"Our expectation is that the train will be profitable, in and of itself."
But Churella is quick to clarify that those figures constitute the "above the rails" profit, and don't account for capital costs like buying trains, laying tracks, and keeping the whole system in good repair. "Doesn't the Northeast Corridor make a profit?" he says. "Only if you assume that the entire physical bed just dropped out of the sky for free."
Mike Reininger, the president and chief development officer of All Aboard Florida, says building and owning infrastructure is not a disadvantage in the long run. "There are a number of these privately operated and profitable businesses in this space," he says, pointing to an Italian high-speed service, Italo, which debuted in 2012. "What's interesting, however, is that while those businesses are profitable, they're profitable even after they have to pay an access fee to utilize the infrastructure they rely on." Instead of paying such a fee, AAF will pay construction costs: building tracks and stations, and upgrading signaling, bridges, and grade crossings.
The cost of the project, says AAF, will be in the neighborhood of $2.5 billion, of which $1.6 billion is expected to come from a RIFF loan from the Federal Railroad Administration. Will All Aboard transport enough people to pay off that loan? Two years ago, in documents submitted to the Florida DOT, AAF cited a preliminary ridership study that estimated it could ultimately book 3.9 million trips each year, with annual fare revenue of $145 million. (Reininger says those figures are conservative, but declined to disclose current projections.)
Under that projection, and assuming a profit margin roughly equivalent to Acela's, AAF would pile up profits approximately equal to annual debt service on the loan. But the passenger rail business seems unlikely to meet what FECI CEO Vincent Signorella told Florida Trends magazine last year was the company's benchmark for investments: doubling its money.
• • • • •
Henry Flagler, founder of the Florida East Coast Railway, has been called the "man who built Miami." There were hardly a thousand people living on the edge of Biscayne Bay when Flagler's tracks reached South Florida at the turn of the 20th century. But that, writes historian Les Standiford in Last Train to Paradise, was his method: "Build a railroad to a place, erect a destination-worthy resort hotel there, and other development was sure to follow." There are streets named for Flagler in nearly every town on Florida's Atlantic Coast — including the four served by AAF's new route.
"When Henry Flagler did his rail line, real estate was a big component," Jose Gonzalez, executive vice president at FECI, All Aboard's parent company, told attendees at a presentation in May. "And it still is today. He would be very proud of the way we're looking at it."
An undated postcard from Florida East Coast passenger rail days. (Wiki Commons)
Over the past few years, AAF has quietly assembled a total of 15 acres* of land in the downtowns of West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami. Most of that property is in Miami, where the company still owns the nine acres on which Flagler's rail yards once stood. Today the site is an eight-block parking lot served by two stations of Miami's Metrorail line and two stations of the downtown people mover. To this site AAF has added an additional two acres, purchased from a Miami Community Redevelopment Agency in September 2013 for $2.7 million.
Right now the area is desolate. "Everything on this site by five o'clock is dead. All the county workers leave, and there's no life here," says Gonzalez, who described the company's plans as we drove through the neighborhood. The only residents in this part of downtown Miami are the homeless, encamped along the chain link fence that marks the northern edge of Flager's property.
When passengers begin arriving in downtown Miami on intercity trains, in 2016, All Aboard Florida plans to have transformed this neighborhood. There will be a colossal station complex designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill that includes a half-dozen towers, over a million square feet of office space, 1,111 residential units, a hotel, car rental outlets, parking, and blocks of ground-floor retail facing the street. (One tower, planned for 70 stories, will be among Florida's tallest.) The main station will arise at the northern edge of the property, across from Metrorail's Overtown stop, while the skyscraper anchors the southern edge. Shoppers, residents, workers and travelers will be able to walk from one end of the development to the other along an internal concourse that bridges several downtown cross streets.
Gonzalez says real estate prices have been rising around the site. "The station will not only bring the people; it will bring a mix of uses and it will help be a catalyst for all these real estate opportunities that have been, for the last decade, passed over. You're going to come back in ten years and say: 'How did this not happen sooner?' "
It appears to be a classic study in value capture, a catch-all term for the variety of practices that governments and developers use to profit from rising land prices spurred by changes both physical, such as a new rail line, and legal, such as a new zoning code. In a case like AAF's, intercity rail transforms a lifeless downtown into a hot commodity, right as transit-oriented development enhances the appeal of carless travel. "What we are really doing is building a platform comprised of two businesses," says Reininger, referring to rail and real estate. "They hold hands, exist independent of one another, but each makes the other one better."
All Aboard FloridaEmpty storefronts line North Miami Avenue, one block from All Aboard Florida's future station complex (top, rendering). (Henry Grabar)
What's happening in downtown Miami is straight out of the Flagler playbook. People both inside and outside of All Aboard Florida talk about the station development as a "catalyst" for transit-oriented development downtown. On two empty acres to the west of the Miami station site, the developers Baron Channer and Don Peebles are building Overtown Gateway, which will include a 150,000 square-foot hotel, 400 apartments, and a mix of retail designed as an entertainment district. Across the street from the station to the east, a mammoth development called Miami World Center — with a million square feet of retail, a 600,000 square foot convention center, and an 1,800-room Marriott — will break ground later this year.
And yet, the underlying consensus in Miami seems to be, as the Brickell City Center developer Stephen Owens put it, that All Aboard’s development is more complement than catalyst. Downtown Miami is finally filling up. The population has nearly doubled over the past decade, from less than 40,000 at the millennium to more than 75,000 today. In a city where growth is driven by mega-projects, no urban fabric is no problem. This part of the city may look bleak to outsiders, but local developers view its growth as the inevitable next step in the revival of downtown Miami.
The question then becomes: Is the value in downtown Miami being created by transit, or is it merely the fruit of a half-century of land banking? That might seem like water cooler talk for Miami real estate brokers, but the answer will go a long way in determining whether All Aboard Florida is the exception to private U.S. passenger rail or the new rule.
• • • • •
Florida East Coast Industries has the opportunity to set an example for American freight railroads, says the Brookings scholar Tomer, a Florida native who has been watching the project closely. "For these rail firms — which often also hold parcels in places, more than you'd think — that's an incredible opportunity to re-jump passenger service by being able to collect rents on their land ownership."
Unlike the activity around commuter rail, subways, and other daily-use transit, the financial spillover effect of a high-speed rail station is not clearly established. "The evidence that's looked at the economic development effect of high-speed rail has shown that there's not a whole lot of local effect," says Levinson. "A comparison is to the airport: What frequent business traveler is going to live next to the airport?"
Looking south down NW 1st Avenue, with All Aboard Florida's nine-acre Miami plot at right. (Henry Grabar)
And yet, research has shown that when high-speed rail does produce big gains, it's when the new station is part of a wider regeneration effort in a depressed, post-industrial center city. South Florida's hollow downtowns seem to fit that profile.
More than the flagship development in the hot Miami market, All Aboard Florida's investments in West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale may send a clear signal of intercity rail's capacity to revitalize a district. Land values in those downtowns are much lower than in Miami — so the value of AAF's projects there may be easier to quantify.
Expect the rest of the rail world to watch those neighborhoods carefully. In the end, any corporation trying to imitate the financial architecture of the AAF project, with its ambitious, integrated, multi-city approach, would need an understanding of whether downtown rail stations were truly causing real estate surges. Is this a project that can be replicated between Houston and Dallas, or Los Angeles and San Diego?
It's a familiar puzzle for those who study growth and development in the city. There’s no prism to split the white light of a vibrant downtown into its various components, isolating the influence of transit from long-term demographic trends, local politics, and the general revival of urban America.
All Aboard Florida may well be a success. But an example?
*CORRECTIONS: A previous version of this story suggested the Orlando leg of All Aboard Florida would open later than the others, and stated there will be 21 acres of transit-oriented development around the South Florida stations. The Orlando leg will open at the same time, and there will be about 15 acres of TOD.
Update: A report from Digital Music News claims that Financial Times got the story about YouTube's upcoming service wrong, and offers an alternative perspective. According to Digital Music News' anonymous source, YouTube will not block the videos that don't sign on with the subscription service. However, the source says the correct intepretation of YouTube's statements are that the site will be blocking music videos from YouTube's monetization program, as whole, if labels can't agree to make their videos available to both the free and premium tiers of the subscription service.
Hence, labels and artists will still be able to post videos, but cannot monetize them through YouTube unless they are onboard with the subscription service. This could have the long-term effect of artists at odds with the subscription service choosing not to post their videos to YouTube at all. That type of resistance to modern digital distribution methods does tend to be rare, on the whole. The original story is below.
YouTube is getting ready to block music videos from artists that haven't agreed to the contract terms for its upcoming subscription service, the Financial Timesreported Tuesday. The videos set to get the boot include those from independent record labels and artists including Adele and Arctic Monkeys.
We’ve received a large number of requests to add a bookmarklet feature to The Old Reader. Today we are excited to be launching this functionality for our premium users. We will likely roll this functionality out to all users at some point in the future, but do not currently have a timeline in place.
The bookmarklet is quickly and easily added to your browser bookmarks and allows you to send a copy of any web page to your TOR account. Those pages are saved in the new bookmarklets section and are also searchable and sharable.
We know a lot of our users will be excited to see this new functionality and we look forward to your feedback. Thanks for using The Old Reader!
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station will soon wake up to a stellar view of Earth while sipping an invigorating cup — or, actually, a pouch — of gourmet espresso.
Italian companies Lavazza, a coffee brand, and Aerotec, an aerospace firm, teamed up to create a coffee machine capable of brewing eye-opening beverages in zero gravity. Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti will deliver the device, appropriately named the “ISSpresso,” and in so doing will also become the first I
Hasbro, not Zazzle, requested the removal–an unprecedented and strange move considering the word “brony” was already copyrighted, technically. The name first appeared on 4chan on 10/23/10, just 13 days after the current My Little Pony reboot, Friendship is Magic, first aired.
According to Horse News, the word “brony” didn’t even appear in official Hasbro content until the show’s “Equestria Girls” song two years ago. Here the term refers just to males, rather than adult fans in general.
