Mattalyst

A Christian ventriloquist and his dummy mock evolution and sing praises to creationism (Found at Everything Is Terrible!; For a related video, click here http://christiannightmares.tumblr.com/post/69009090387/creationism-vs-evolution-bogus-stats-and-bored)

theonion:

Child Unaware Just How Many Of His Toys Intended To Steer Him Away From Homosexuality

I'll begin by saying I was simultaneously the worst and best person to attend a #healthgoth SoulCycle spinoff. I'd never done a spin or SoulCycle class. I'd seen them in movies and have always wanted to try them, but they're generally weirdly expensive and I was afraid of being pushed too far out of my comfort zone. So I was really excited—and really anxious—about checking out Monster Cycle, a health studio with a goth, raver twist, on Lafayette Street in Manhattan. (Admittedly, not the most "goth" neighborhood in New York City.)

[body_image width='2000' height='1333' path='images/content-images/2015/05/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/14/' filename='monster-cycle-the-goth-spin-off-of-soul-cycle-feels-like-taking-mdma-235-body-image-1431622855.jpg' id='56254']

All photos by Amy Lombard

I arrived about 45 minutes before class. I'd been running around the city for 24 hours in 80-degree weather and felt dirty and exhausted. As soon as I walked into Monster Cycle, I felt better. The young woman at the counter, Heatley, was personable and charming. A mini-fridge full of liter-sized Fiji waters sat behind her.

I told Heatley I had to pee before I could think, so she sent me downstairs to the bathroom. She told me that I might run into the owner, Michael, down there.

"What does he look like?" I asked.

"He has a wolf tattoo on his neck," she replied.

[body_image width='2000' height='1333' path='images/content-images/2015/05/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/14/' filename='monster-cycle-the-goth-spin-off-of-soul-cycle-feels-like-taking-mdma-235-body-image-1431622706.jpg' id='56246']

I have a thing for bathrooms: I like comparing their different features and failings. So when I walked into the bathroom to pee, and found a shower and outlets and fresh towels, I was pleasantly surprised. To get the optimum experience of the studio, I decided to take a shower using the provided Monster Cycle brand shampoo and Dr. Bronner's soap. (Note: after class and right before class, the lines for the restrooms and showers were insane. I enjoyed this luxury only because I came early. I highly recommend it.)

Another extra touch at Monster Cycle is that they have the things you sometimes forget when you go to the gym; they had bowls overflowing with hair ties and socks. (My friend got a pair with unicorns on them, making me wish I'd also forgotten socks.)

The owner of Monster Cycle, Michael Macneal, has been featured as a leader in the health goth scene by the New York Times. Macneal grew up in Pennsylvania on the DJ/rave scene, and he explained that he had wanted to own his own SoulCycle studio by his thirtieth birthday. He's ahead of the game, because he just turned 30, and the studio is two years old. Macneal says that he and his partner—Demetre Daskalakis, a doctor—have been called a "health power couple." Macneal told VICE he was "obsessed with the high from group cycle classes" but felt that something was always missing—he wanted to feel like he'd attended an event while exercising. His idea evolved into his Monster Cycle class: 45-minute exercise sessions in the pitch dark, while music videos play to motivate and inspire you. Macneal says what sets Monster Cycle apart from other studios is that they embrace all types of music styles with specials rides like Metal Monday, Goth Pop, Punk, and Trap Week.

[body_image width='2000' height='1333' path='images/content-images/2015/05/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/14/' filename='monster-cycle-the-goth-spin-off-of-soul-cycle-feels-like-taking-mdma-235-body-image-1431622730.jpg' id='56247']

You can reserve which bike you want, which is cool—if you're a frequent flier you probably have a spot you like. I chose the back row. Macneal was our leader (Teacher? Coach? Cycle Messiah?), and he was fantastic and unpretentious and inclusive. I like that in an exercise teacher. He had to come help me get my shoes into the slots. I kept my bike on really low resistance most of the time. (I'm not a runner or a biker.)

When we were two minutes into class, I turned to my friend, smiling, and said, "I love this! I'm into it!" Looking back, I cannot believe I was so naive.

My internal monologue went something like, Oh my God, when will this be over I hate it I'm so out of shape what time is it, this is fucking horrible actually it's kind of awesome I'm burning so many calories I love that it's pitch black this music video is fucking cool, the chick is like in her underwear drinking champagne with a gun to her head, oh there's Taylor Swift in the video, cool, if I lived in NYC I'd come here a few times a week and be in amazing shape I'm so fucking healthy that I'm here on a Friday night ARGH this can't be good for my body I can't do it I want to stop I hate this if I lived in NYC I would never come here! This feels really good no it feels really bad. And so on. Classic ego chatter.

[body_image width='2000' height='1333' path='images/content-images/2015/05/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/14/' filename='monster-cycle-the-goth-spin-off-of-soul-cycle-feels-like-taking-mdma-235-body-image-1431622838.jpg' id='56253']

Macneal swooped by and danced around through the bikes, checking in on a few people, encouraging them. When he came up to me, I said, "I'm dying." He turned my resistance up a little, put his hands on my hands, and said, "You're doing great, see? You're not dying yet!" I have to say, it boosted my ego—this dude is good at what he does.

If the music videos weren't playing, it would be really hard to be in that class. I might have had to leave. But the videos made me want to dance.

Macneal danced and cheered us on the entire time, in a way that was not annoying at all. "Don't slow down!" "Don't take it easy on yourself!" "Push it!" (The opposite of the yoga classes I normally frequent: "Take it slow, take it easy, don't push yourself.")

[body_image width='2000' height='1333' path='images/content-images/2015/05/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/14/' filename='monster-cycle-the-goth-spin-off-of-soul-cycle-feels-like-taking-mdma-235-body-image-1431622765.jpg' id='56249']

It wasn't till afterward that I realized there were no goth people in my class. I thought I was going to see lots of decked-out piercings and tats and black, but everyone looked normal. Apparently, bankers love this place. They sit in their offices all day and then go hard at Monster Cycle. I mean, they flow hard.

I didn't know how to get off the bike, which kind of gave me a panic attack, so I just took my feet out of the shoes and left. I was covered in sweat and stickiness like never before. It scared me. I stripped my clothes off and put my dress back on.

My friend and I left and went for pizza and wine in Little Italy, and that's when the effects kicked in, super similar to taking a taste of MDMA. We were giddy and high. My body was relaxed and loose. I could see that people go to places like Monster Cycle to drink the Kool-Aid. And I respect that, because you can feel like you did drugs without doing drugs, which at this point in my life is profoundly important to me.

[body_image width='2000' height='1333' path='images/content-images/2015/05/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/14/' filename='monster-cycle-the-goth-spin-off-of-soul-cycle-feels-like-taking-mdma-235-body-image-1431622785.jpg' id='56250']

So it's a happy ending. Overall: Monster Cycle has fantastic service, an unpretentious vibe, and generally wants the best for you and your body and mental health. Michael says that the Monster Cycle Studio is the edgiest and sexiest studio you will ever encounter and that they will continue to push the envelope every chance they get. I believe him.

Though, I do think it would be more inclusive if they had one night a week where they offered classes at a sliding scale or a cheaper price. (Classes currently run around $35 a pop.) When I win the lottery, I'll go there every day of my life and find my higher self.

Follow Chloe Caldwell on Twitter.

shadowblinder:

#TO WAR

kabrona:

Summer body wishlist:
- six wings
- a million eyes
- constantly on fire
- ability to scream forever

towritecomicsonherarms:

Penny Dreadful saves Vincent
Penny is a cryptophage who eats monsters.

Witch Doctor

In creating a map illustrating the causes of death most common in the citizens of each state, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention went further than merely to show the main culprits such as heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes, which are basically equal opportunity killers across the board. Some lesser causes of mortality are far more common in some states than in others.

After performing several calculations in their line of research, the CDC revealed a list of 23 secondary causes of death. Read more about how the findings were calculated and see which of the 23 causes of death was most common in your state here. 

Image: CDC 

Indexed

Wieners are hilarious

overdose-affliction:

Here’s a friendly PSA from Captain America to adorn your dashboard

demonslayingfordummies:

pornottack:

lootcrate:

The most aMEOWzing action film of the summer!

(Please let us know if you know the artist for this so we can give credit)

demonslayingfordummies

NOW THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO SEE

путен гарант шариата
поздравляю вас

dalekofchaos:

Oh fuck you

cf-12:

high tech / low life

[body_image width='1920' height='1080' path='images/content-images/2015/05/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/14/' filename='knowing-the-streets-of-grand-theft-auto-v-meant-i-never-felt-alone-in-the-city-of-angels-046-body-image-1431597543.jpg' id='56057']

One of the best things about a video game where you can do anything is the option of doing nothing. Which is to say for me, the most entertaining moments of Grand Theft Auto V weren't the elaborate set pieces (though the bank heist was certainly nice), or the thrill of driving expensive cars at dangerous speeds, or the ability to cause general mayhem and watch madness unfold. Nor was it the soundtrack, which was certainly excellent. Instead, I gravitated toward the calmer moments, the eyes of the storm in a game that was all hurricane.

One of those was golf. Over the six months I sunk into GTA V, I spent hours playing as Michael De Santa at the Los Santos Golf Club, taking a perverse pleasure in the fact that an entire virtual world swirled around me. As Michael, I'd killed hundreds (if not thousands) of virtual humans—some who deserved it, some who happened to be standing on the road as I was flying down the highway evading the fuzz—and was simultaneously under the employ of the Feds, a shady studio head, and a Mexican cartel.

But on the golf course, all of that melted away. There was no mechanic where I could accidentally trip up the next part of the story, or trigger someone into shooting me. There was only golf. The pleasure I took in knocking back nine holes on the course was immense. I eventually got so good that I even beat Castro Lagano, the golf-obsessed philanderer who needs a ride to the country club and is at least good enough to play on the GTA equivalent to the National Tour.

Another was driving around peacefully. No speeding, no driving in the other lane, no knocking trashcans or signs over for kicks. I covered the entirety of GTA's map, drinking in Los Santos, its virtual facsimile of Los Angeles. The streets, the mountains, the deserts, the beaches, the weird hippie encampments on the outskirts, all offered rich landscapes to be explored. And explore I did, until I knew Los Santos well enough to drive around it without a map.

Related: VICE's documentary on the American obsession with Pinball:

The similarities between Los Santos and Los Angeles are well-documented—the GTA fansite GTAist offers perhaps the most definitive proof of this, in which a fan recreates 22 stills from the game, showing the painstaking detail the team at Rockstar Games put into rendering the virtual world. One of the highlights of any GTA is the vivid setting they take place in, but in previous games the host cities were smaller; more like Epcot replicas than the real thing. Even GTA IV, which rendered a New York full of shadows and grays, failed to recreate the part of Brooklyn I lived in, eschewing the hipster milieu of Brooklyn and Greenpoint and instead focusing on the drab industrial wasteland it had once been. (Though it's worth mentioning that some elements of Williamsburg were folded into BOABO, the game's version of BK's tech-y, hip DUMBO neighborhood.)

When, six months ago, I moved from New York to Los Angeles, it was already like I knew the place. On one of my first days in the city, I drove from Venice to Santa Monica, and then to Beverly Hills, continuing upwards into the Hollywood Hills. I'd seen all of it before—the place in Venice (Vespucci in GTA V) where Michael vented to his mindless therapist; the Santa Monica (Del Perro) pier where Trevor snipes the crooked federal agent Steve Haines; Rodeo Drive (Portola Drive) where, as the gold-hearted gang-banger Franklin, I'd gone to buy myself some new clothes. I took in the Hollywood sign, rendered in the game as the Vinewood sign. It's sensations of familiarity that make a strange place feel more like home—even if I was seeing this stuff for the first time, I'd already been there virtually, and with few real friends to my name in the city, it was as close to a welcome as I was likely to get.

[body_image width='1920' height='1080' path='images/content-images/2015/05/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/14/' filename='knowing-the-streets-of-grand-theft-auto-v-meant-i-never-felt-alone-in-the-city-of-angels-046-body-image-1431597563.jpg' id='56058']

The game doesn't stop at replicating Los Angeles geographically—it also renders the vapidity and general ridiculousness that people associate with the city. When he reviewed the game after beating it in a single, 38-hour session, BuzzFeed's Joe Bernstein wrote of Los Santos, "It is a funhouse, a place where cliché endlessly pinballs off cliché and yields something new. In its pastiche, and in its systems-level scope, GTA V resembles, at times, a high postmodern novel."

Which is to say, Los Santos people tend to do all of the things our worst perceptions of Los Angeles people do. Talk radio hosts scream about nonsense, ad infinitum. Michael's wife cheats on him with her yoga teacher. Franklin works out constantly at Muscle Beach. Trevor hangs out with a weed activist and hallucinates that aliens are attacking him (OK, the last part of that isn't quite realistic). Everyone is an asshole to you when you're driving, which in my experience, is a fairly accurate representation of how LA streets work.

Recently, it was announced that Rockstar was done expanding on GTA V, capping off a run that saw the game earn current-gen releases for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, as well as retrofitted for online gameplay with special, online-only heists. For those hoping that the game would never end and instead continue expanding until the sun exploded and the oceans boiled, this is a disappointment. But for me, not so much, as I've gotten all I need out of the game. And now, I live in it.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

Cults rarely end on a high note: They hinge on anticipation, rather than results. Either they implode amid schisms and in-fighting, or they fail to deliver a promised apocalypse.

The Jejune Institute might have gone the same way. Over three years, the game/art installation/social movement became a living metafiction, encompassing a series of “episodes” staged around San Francisco as well as an online community. You might call it an alternate reality game, but its creator insists the term is insufficient.

Between 2008 and 2011, the Jejune Institute “inducted” over 7,000 players, many of whom did not know whether they were involved with a game or a religious cult. As talk spread of advertisements for “human force fields” and phone boxes which instructed you to dance in the street, the mysterious phenomenon was written up in the New York Times and a series of essays in The Awl. It culminated in the production of The Institute, a documentary which departs its genre halfway through, reneging its mission by turning into fiction.

The game was free-form and sprawling: “Meta threads for the meta-minded” sprung up on forums. Tribute blogs appeared for the mysterious missing punk teenager Eva, the subject of a search mission around San Francisco, along with a Yelp page for the Jejune Induction Centre, where new recruits were directed to a small room to see an instructional video. An anti-Jejune Institute propaganda radio station (also part of the plot) can even still be heard if you look for it playing on a loop in parts of San Francisco.

The Institute ends with an assembly of the final, most hardcore Jejune participants invited to a day-long “Socio-Reengineering” seminar, where they try out jokey New Age trust building exercises and ritualistically consume tea in pursuit of an elusive state of being known as “Divine Nonchalance”. Those interviewed in the film seem disappointed with this lesser Rapture: after spending years in pursuit of the vague promise of spiritual epiphany, the creators had finally revealed themselves, killing the Jejune dream in the process.

The twist, however, is that their “recondite family” might have returned with a new game, albeit in an unrecognisable form. It might even have already started.

Image: The Institute Movie

“You can describe anything as a game. A court of law is a game. An election cycle is a game. Life itself is a game.”

I spoke to Jeff Hull, creator of the Jejune Institute and its world, to find out what has happened since the film was released. I was a little apprehensive about interviewing Hull: a Nonchalance website appeared two years ago, taking credit for the Jejune Institute, but has acted as little more than a holding page. There a few testimonials for what is described as a “situational design agency”—my fear was that they and their alternate reality games (ARGs) had sold out.

“I just have to get on record as saying that, to me, ARGs are dead.” Hull is speaking to me over Skype. He is driving, either somewhere in the “deep woods” or somewhere in San Francisco—he’s cryptic about it, as he is with many things. “It is no small annoyance to me that this work gets described as an alternate reality game,” he continues. “I hate them. I hate them. They’re two-dimensional. They’re usually marketing material. They don’t have any higher ambition. Everything that we are doing asks people to challenge themselves, and I don’t think that ARGs have ever done that.”

He is deliberately careful about labelling his creations. “You can describe anything as a game. A court of law is a game. An election cycle is a game. Life itself is a game.”

By this logic he describes the Jejune Institute as an “experience” rather than a game, one which can be handled on multiple levels depending on the player. Along with creatives Uriah Findley and Sara Tacher, and a wider team of Jejune devotees, Hull framed a series of hypnagogic episodes which gave the player, or searcher, just enough leeway for independent thought.

Screenshot: Jejune Institute trailer

The Jejune Institute first announced itself in 2008 with a series of fliers advertising pataphysical health products like the “Vital Orbit Human Forcefield”, “Poliwater” (a more condensed form of water), a “Trans-time Camera” which could photograph the past, and most mysteriously, a handheld device known as “The Algorithm”, which could apparently resolve worldly discord with the touch of a button.

“I still think about the Algorithm,” Hull tells me. “The idea still feels really salient, of somehow using math and science and technology to solve the world’s spiritual problems.”

In a TEDx talk on “Variability and Play in the Civic Realm”, Hull described society’s lack of a “third place” beyond home and work for play and social interaction. Technology, in addition, forms a “fourth place”, one which can lend dimension to life just as easily as it can become a black hole. In The Institute, technology, such as the screen which shows players induction videos, is a sinister tool for brainwashing and spiritual contamination.

The Jejune experience was transmedia in the purest sense—at the time the team couldn't even expect everyone to have a smartphone—and lives on in remaining fragments and the memories of its fans. “The legacy right now of the Jejune Institute is a new group of people in San Francisco called the Elsewhere Philatelic Society,” Hull explains. “They’re former participants who went on to create their own series of experiences, with new plots and new characters.”

Outside the Philatelic Society, which paid homage to the original game with a series of commemorative stamps among other activities, there remains a club of people associated with the Institute. Everyone who appeared in the film is still part of the Nonchalant community, which is in turn tightly knitted into the fabric of its home: “It was really about San Francisco; it was an homage to the area I grew up in. All the New Age crackpots, those earnest ideals that can so easily turn into something absurd, or something really dangerous.”

The Jejune Institute may also be appearing on screen again soon. Though Hull is not involved with the project personally, he mentions, “There’s a possibility that the documentary may turn into a studio film.”

"If we can create a new story, through real-world narrative experiences, then we are creating reality."

More exciting for those who missed the chance to join in last time, or have been patiently waiting for another go, is that there is apparently a second game (or "experience"): one as of yet nameless, at least to those not immediately involved in it. According to Hull, a new Nonchalance team has assembled and are working in conditions which sound not unlike the plot of the film Frank. “We’ve been living in a deep forest for the last few years, in a kind of monastic setting,” he tells me. “We’ve been really digging deep, cultivating a whole new universe.”

Hull will not go into detail about his new creation, apart from confirming that it is not a sequel to the Jejune Institute. He does see it, however, as an evolution of its predecessor: “We’re being really ambitious, addressing the theme of a collective reality. Our beliefs come from the stories we tell, and our stories come from our experiences. So if we can create a new story, through real-world narrative experiences, then we are creating reality…”

I ask him if the plot will be completely new. Hull replies that it will be timeless. Where will it take place? “I can say that it’s not local, and not on the internet.” I ask if it will involve technology, and he tells me, “The technologies we’re using are the same ones they used to build the pyramids.” Aliens? “Yes. Ancient alien technologies.” (This is the first and only time in our conversation that Hull sounds less than serious, though I wouldn’t put aliens past him).

I ask him if this is The Latitude, a rumoured successor to the Jejune Institute, but he refuses to comment. I am beginning to suspect that Jeff Hull is the creator of Cicada 3301.

I ask him when this new experience will launch. “Oh, it’s already out. It’s secretly been out for a long, long time. I think it is going to proliferate hugely, just by remaining a secret.”

Can he at least offer any clues?

“I have already given the clues.”

He has?

“I can’t really talk about that right now. I told you this would be cryptic.”

Perfect Worlds is a series on Motherboard about simulations, imitations, and models. Follow along here.

the-incredible-shulk:

yeah

surprisebitch:

i thought this was gonna be uplifting and inspiring. i hate this so much

“My perception of the world made me feel a more acute form of the strangeness of things. In the silence and immensity, each object was cut off by a knife, detached in the void, in limitless space, separated from other objects. By the very fact of being alone, without any link with the environment, it began to exist. I felt as if I had been thrown out of the world, outside life, as if I were a spectator of some endless, chaotic film in which I could not take part. I knew not how to reach for anything.”

-   Michel Foucault (via awreckageofstars)

[body_image width='700' height='438' path='images/content-images/2015/05/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/15/' filename='behind-the-rise-in-hijab-porn-body-image-1431707663.jpg' id='56680']

Mia Khalifa. Image via Hot Gossip Italia

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Last year, BangBros released a threesome scene between a caucasian "biker," his "Middle Eastern girlfriend," and her "stepmom." The latter two are both wearing headscarves in the clip. Needless to say, they don't sit around the kitchen table and debate the merits of a one-state solution. They fuck.

The title is pretty revealing: Mia Khalifa Is Cumming for Dinner. A play on Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the 1967 American comedy-drama exploring interracial marriage in a—for the time—pretty groundbreakingly positive portrayal. BangBros must have known their entirely different cross-culture interaction wasn't going to play well with everyone. In fact, they were probably banking on it.

Lebanon-born, US-based porn star Khalifa herself must have had an inkling the scene would shock. Was she consciously courting such controversy? I tried to reach out to Khalifa through various channels, but was told that she was in "lockdown with PornHub." The porn site also declined to comment.

In a matter of months, Khalifa went from a relative nobody to the poster girl of the US porn industry—overtaking the recently retired Lisa Ann as PornHub's highest-ranked adult star. In the age of internet porn, dominated by tube sites, there is no bigger accolade. And Khalifa owed it all to the fallout from that one hijab-featuring scene.

Predictably, the use of traditional female Muslim dress—which appears to be nothing more than an incendiary prop—sparked outrage. Trolls took to Twitter to call Khalifa "shameful." Others threatened to chop her head off. One guy even took the time to mock up Khalifa in an orange jump suit, on her knees, in what one can only imagine is supposed to depict the prelude to an ISIS beheading.

Even her family got on board. "We are probably paying the price of living away from our homeland; our kids had to adapt to societies that don't resemble our culture, traditions, and values... We hope that she comes back to her senses as her image does not honor her family or Lebanon," they said in a statement.

Khalifa took the whole thing in stride, perhaps buoyed by her burgeoning fanbase (American duo Timeflies even recorded a song about her, now with more than 1.4 million plays on SoundCloud). As she told one hater who threatened her with a beheading: "Long as it's not my tits. They were expensive." Another, who warned Khalifa that she'll be "the first person in Hellfire," was told: "I've been meaning to get a little tan recently."

She may have been making light of the matter, but through measured interviews, Khalifa—who is not a Muslim—said she wasn't ignorant to the cultural sensitivity of the scene. She told the Washington Post that scenes with a hijab are "satirical" and that "Hollywood movies depict Muslims in a much worse manner than any scene BangBros could produce."

Eventually, she vented on Twitter. "Doesn't the Middle East have more important things to worry about besides me?" she wrote. "How about finding a president? Or containing ISIS?"

Put in context, the outrage does rather seem a waste of cyberspace. But like it or not, hijab porn is Khalifa's fledgling legacy. Adult film director and writer Jacky St James, profiled in January by Salon as "The Woman Who Conquered Porn," believes Khalifa's scene has "all the makings of a publicity stunt," and one that "clearly succeeded in creating the controversy it was hoping for." But she's reluctant to assume the use of the hijab will create a new trend.

Related: For more on porn, watch our doc 'VICE Meets Larry Flynt':

"It will depend entirely on whether it sells," she says. "With all the online piracy happening to the industry today, so much of the content shot is reliant upon this."

Some sectors of the industry clearly think it will, as hinted at by the influx of studio-shot scenes. First came BangBros, then, in February, Texan Chloe Amour starred as a woman from Dubai in a scene for Fantasy Massage (insisting she wanted a female masseur, but getting a male one—go figure), and last month TeamSkeet released Cream Filled Middle Eastern Beauty.

Most of these scenes play on the notion of the Middle Eastern woman as the innocent yet obedient sexual object, subjugated to do anything a man asks of her. Which, in most cases, is giving a blow job. In these scenes, the hijab or headscarf is used as an insignia for "Middle Eastern girl," a way to tell the viewer (along with the bashful glances and often feigned Middle Eastern accents) that this girl is a sexually repressed "Arab" ready and willing to bow down to her Western master.

But can the hijab really be seen as nothing more than a prop, in the same way that thick-rimmed specs and a short skirt, or a cheerleader costume and pom-poms are props for naughty secretaries and school girls, respectively? Don't the enduring politics and wider conversations surrounding hijabs, religion, and women's rights across the Middle East make it difficult to see hijabs out of context?

Commentators on the Adult DVD Talk forum don't seem to think so. "There will always be a market for this kind of porn as long as Muslim people are so uptight about sex," says aptly-named user, "Bellend."

But what are Bellend and others' stereotypes about the Middle East being some kind of sexless wasteland actually based on?

"The supposed licentiousness of the West is forever being contrasted, to my mind, in wholly spurious ways, with a sexually barren Middle East," John R. Bradley, author of Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East, told Salon in 2010, shortly before removing himself from public life due to ill health.

Behind the Veil of Vice, he continues, was an attempt to undermine "stereotypes about Arab sexualities that have become entrenched in the English-speaking world [and] it debunks the notion, promoted by the likes of Martin Amis, that terrorism carried out by Islamists can be explained away with reference to the repressed, envious Arab male who can only find release by flying airliners into phallic-shaped skyscrapers."

The book explored the idea that watching pornography is "no longer a big deal for young Arabs, any more than it is for young Americans," and that "just about anyone in the Middle East with a satellite dish has access to hardcore pornography channels," albeit illegal ones only accessed by satellite decoders. Statistics prove it. According to recent Google data, six of the top eight porn-searching countries are Muslim states (Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey). The most popular porn searches of 2014 by country reflect a trend for the "hijab"—the search term ranked number four in Morocco and number five in Algeria.

Clearly, demand for hijab porn is high. If you type the word into the search bar of Pornhub or xvideos, you'll see thumbnail after thumbnail of porn featuring the headscarf—some cam stuff, lots of homemade POV and the odd budget studio job. But if porn is illegal in most Middle Eastern countries and Muslim states, where does it all come from?

"Men and women all over the Arab world not only watch porn, they film themselves engaging in sexual relations or masturbating, and post the clips on the internet," Eyal Sagui Bizawe recently wrote in an article for Israeli website Haaretz. "These are watched by Arabs from various countries who want to hear sex talk in their own language, and by surfers everywhere who are tired of the rigid and monotonous Western model of beauty."

"The adult industry is more diverse than people may realize." —Jacky St. James

User-generated content of this kind, posted on platforms such as Vine and Periscope, is the antithesis of studio-produced adult video. There's no market, profit margins, or overheads. There is only content, created by one person for another person, and often shared secretly and involuntarily. As a result, it reflects a society's sexuality in its truest form. This is not subjugation. This is representation.

"Regardless of one's perspective on the hijab, there are many women in the world who wear them and, as such, the garment's presence in porn showcases yet another moment of human diversity," says Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals, sociologist and author of the upcoming book Exposure: A Sociologist Explores Sex, Society, and Adult Entertainment.

Can we honestly say, though, that the hijab appearing in adult content (even with the user-generated stuff) actually shines a positive light on the sexuality of women in the Middle East?

"Though not without controversy and definitely not without mixed reactions, I would say so, yes," says TIbbals. "As a finished product, porn cannot be considered a literal or 'real' reflection of anyone or anything. It's a contrived production, just like any other media or narrative."

Actual people, however, are present in porn.

"Yes, and if said actual existing people creating user-generated content are also women in the Middle East, for example, these representations must show some dimension of sexualities," she continues. "Even if it's just that there are people interested in producing erotic media in regions of the globe that we, as US people, don't generally think of as porn hubs."

It's probably fair to say that most of us in the West have only a very surface-level understanding of Middle Eastern sexuality. As another commentator on the Adult DVD Talk forum writes: "I think you might be missing the point of Mia Khalifa wearing a hijab. It's not just a political statement. This kind of thing is a turn-on for many guys in strict Muslim countries. I've spent a few years in such a country. And I know it for a fact that a woman wearing a hijab and covering everything except her eyes looks very sexy and attractive. It's a cultural kind of thing that perhaps people in the West don't understand."

The producers at BangBros may well have shot Mia Khalifa Is Cumming for Dinner to cash in on the West's stereotypical ideas of Arab girls. But by owning it, Khalifa—a woman with Middle Eastern roots making headway in mainstream Western pornography—has sparked a debate about the reverse of that very idea: the apparent and already occurring sexual liberation of such women.

"The adult industry is more diverse than people may realize," says St James. "There are lines glorifying a wide variety of types: body size, breast size, butt size, race, tatted women, older women, younger women." Porn is no longer just the bleach-blond woman with gigantic breasts performing only the most extreme sex acts. As St. James says: "That model isn't an accurate representation of the industry anymore."

Follow Gareth on Twitter.

What happens when alcoholic mad scientist Rick and his grandson/sidekick Morty invade The Simpsons season finale? Well, first they manage to kill the whole family in the couch gag, meaning that the pair then have to scramble to put the whole lot of them back together.

Read more...

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/hooKVstzbz0' width='480' height='360']

One more time for the road: The Leeroy Jenkins video is ten years old.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

This week saw the tenth anniversary of one of the internet's most popular mainstays. A video whose fame was reliant on the kind of people the internet predominantly belonged to a decade ago: men in their early to mid-20s who were into MMORPGS. Yes, Leeroy Jenkins—the chicken-loving bro who (supposedly) ruined a raid on World of Warcraft by running, kamikaze-style, into the battle area early, much to the chagrin of a bag of nerdish, unimpressed paladins and warriors—somehow happened ten years ago.

In those ten years, the internet has moved on in ways we could never have predicted. For a start, the geeks have been pushed to the dim-lit back alleys of the web by football banter accounts, Facebook aunties, and everyone else in the Western world. The instantaneous sharing of information has become so succinct that traveling to hundreds of different websites for different videos and images is a thing of the past. We all only use about five websites now: Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, plus a news source that tallies with our own political sympathies. They all intertwine to pump the same things into your feed. Your friend shared it on Facebook? Someone's tweeted it as well. They might have also put it on Ello, but who the fuck is looking there?

Gone are the days when you'd have to go to eBaum's World, then to NewGrounds, then to LiquidGeneration, or YTMND, if you were so inclined. Back then, the content was dispersed through a hundred different channels, the internet was a Spaghetti Junction of pneumatic postal tubes delivering lolcats and "fail" videos to your creaky living room dial-up. Now we just sit back, covered in Mini Cheddar dust and globs of Frijj, waiting for something to trend.

Leeroy Jenkins never trended. It was never in the "Explore" section of Twitter, it wasn't in that sidebar on Facebook. It was never a "This Group Of WoW Players Go On A Raid, And You Won't Believe What Happens Next" article. Before that, a video going viral was dependent on whether we wanted it to or not. Millions of things will have been ignored, deemed not lulzy or important enough, but many break through. Flash cartoons, like Bananaphone, were once the prime example of a shareable meme video. When was the last time you got excited about a flash cartoon? When was the last time a crudely drawn character, whose voice is badly recorded on one of those old mics that look like a cross between the Pixar lamp and a creature from Prometheus, made it to the homepage of YouTube? This brand of shoddy yet heartfelt DIY creativity has long since died out, and is as likely to make a comeback as Britpop-themed chat rooms and paying for porn.

Why? There is simply too much money at stake now. As soon as an "internet creative" gets a sniff of success they're being sponsored, their clicks turn to pound coins and they end up in the editing suite of some TV studio before you can say "Shoop Da Whoop." The power of discernment has shifted away from us and towards the people who always had it anyway. Editors, businessmen, marketers—professionals whose job it is to make you watch stuff, as opposed to letting you watch it if you want to.

A bitter nostalgia for this lost and more democratic online era is felt in many corners of the net. Any aspect that hasn't become too showbiz feels the need to exile itself to the darker regions. 4Chan is still going, and reddit feels like its less evil bastard child: the Max Mosley to its Oswald. The lewdness, the danger, becomes rarer the more the culture is homogenised and simplified.

WATCH: We Got 20 British Strangers Who Aren't Models to Kiss Each Other:

There are still avenues for funny, weird things to grow organically. Six-second video creator Vine has given a generation of teenagers their opportunity to create things unfettered by big business influence, undisturbed by the question of whether it's WTF or LOL in Buzzfeed's Geiger counter of bullshit. Of course, the natural desire to be loved and shared is still there. There are still people singing, attention seeking, quirking. But there's a sense of freedom to it, and through its inherent spontaneity a lack of the kind of studied narcissism that pervades YouTube in the form of vloggers, and Instagram in the form of everything.

It used to be a surprise to have something go viral. Nowadays, it's an entitlement, an expectation. Leeroy Jenkins is a possibly made-up scenario that only a couple of people, by rights, should be amused by. It was dumped online. There was no social media team behind it, no #AtLeastIHaveChicken hashtag.

It increasingly feels like we're being robbed of our choice to decide whether things go viral or not. Given the world's current climate of constant abject horror in every waking corner, this may seem unimportant. But it's not. The internet has grown in the last decade from a fringe space occupied by WoW-players to the most prominent gallery spot in our culture. Leeroy Jenkins is a relic. It's a reminder that once upon a time the internet gave us the power to choose and make "famous" whatever we wanted to, before auto-playing LAD Bible Facebook videos, before branded content made you feel as small and patroniszd as every billboard and TV ad. In online terms, Leeroy Jenkins is a world heritage site; it deserves a blue plaque on the big memorial wall of the internet's lost souls.

Follow Joe on Twitter.