The Huffington Post did a gender swap on book covers, proving — once again — that literature by and about women gets the worst fucking cover art.
via Jezebel http://jezebel.com/the-huffington-post-did-a-gender-swap-on-book-covers-p-496704562
Finally, a Good Look at The Hunger Games’ Finnick
We’ve seen many Capitol portraits thus far, from Effie to Katniss, and this isn’t the first Finnick shot released, but it’s still the best look. Sam Claflin plays the god-like aquatic goofball, and he’s very good looking (CHEEKBONES); but you know how it could be better? To quote Dodai, “It would be so much hotter if that were Jesse Williams, right? Right. Not gonna let that go.”
Now, we’re just waiting on Philip Seymour Hoffman as Plutarch Heavensbee, Toby Jones as Claudius Templesmith, and Donald Sutherland back as President Snow? (Shudder on that last one.)
And below we also have the wonderful Jeffrey Wright as Beetee (my favorite! I love Beetee!), and gorgeous Jena Malone as gorgeous Johanna Mason. All these beautiful people; it’s about to give me a complex.
via Jezebel http://jezebel.com/5989363/finally-a-good-look-at-the-hunger-games-finnick-plus-beetee-and-johanna
Instacane Brings Us ‘Amaro’ and ‘X-Pro’ Tinged Photos of Frankenstorm
It’s getting to a point where before you can claim the tumblr name for a brilliant website, meme, or app idea, the online hive mind has already beaten you to it. Instacane is the story of Hurricane Sandy, as told through Instagram photos. It’s pretty mesmerizing; I’ve been clicking refresh every minute to find out the latest. Internet, what will you think of next?
via Jezebel http://jezebel.com/5955670/instacane-brings-us-amaro-and-x+pro-tinged-photos-of-frankenstorm
Anonymous Names Names: Outing the Man Who Allegedly Drove Amanda Todd to Suicide [Video]
Anonymous is claiming that Kody Maxson, a 30-year-old (former?) Facebook employee living in New Westminster, British Columbia, is the man who allegedly harassed Vancouver-area 15-year-old Amanda Todd so relentlessly that she took her own life on Oct. 10. In their YouTube video, a Guy Fawkes-outfitted anonybro with an auto-tuned voice reports that Anonymous has discovered a connection between Maxson and Todd, and it looks pretty damning.
Linking to a Pastebin page with Maxson’s personal information, Anonymous lays out pretty specific personal information. Vice takes it a step further by publishing information that allegedly connects the two — including screenshots of Google Maps near Maxson’s house, more of Maxson’s personal info, and screenshots of jailbait websites accounts that appear to link Maxson and Todd. Even though they’ve blurred out some of the names, you can see the disturbing association painted pretty clearly.
If Maxson is the creep who Anonymous alleges him to be, he’s in for a world of pain, as Facebook groups have already popped up with names like, “Kody maxson WILL die,” and “Kody Maxson Better Sleep With 1 Eye Open.” After all, he would be the principal orchestrator of Todd’s misery — the one who originally asked her to flash him, and then proceeded to hunt her down online a year later, demanding (according to the notes in her heartbreaking video) that she put on a show for him or he’d expose her. She didn’t, and what happened next is truly awful:
That’s when Amanda got “really sick” — she was diagnosed with depression and started drinking and doing drugs to get rid of the anxiety. It didn’t help, and the bullying, which grew more intense as more and more people found out about the naked photos, didn’t stop. The man created a Facebook page with a list of her friends and school, using Amanda’s naked chest as his profile photo. She changed schools, but the bullying followed her there, too. (That’s the thing about the internet.)
As we know, the harassment continued, and eventually culminated in Todd committing suicide. The story blew up but, as usual in cases like this, it was too late to help the actual victim. As Katie rightfully points out:
But the power of internet anonymity – the sense that you can say whatever you want online, that it doesn’t matter – exacerbates the issue, as does a culture that sends young women (and everyone else) mixed messages by teaching them that the only way they’ll be loved is if they show off their bodies, unless they do it too often/the wrong way/to the wrong people, in which case, they’re sluts.
In light of Gawker’s exposure of notorious troll Violentacrez, and Katie’s article about CreepShot-posting creeps being called out, it feels like there’s steady momentum in the direction of increased intolerance of this specific brand of internet bullshit.
Maybe taking away the anonymity of these people won’t completely solve the problem, but perhaps it’ll slow things down, allowing would-be harassers to think twice. It likely won’t stop the real psychopaths, those hell-bent on being creeps, but it’ll probably encourage people who aren’t 100 percent devoted to being gross to put the brakes on. Plus, there is so much power in peers telling peers: “Hey, what you’re doing isn’t cool, so knock it the fuck off.” I’m guessing that’s our most effective weapon in bully culture, the ability of everyone on the sidelines to say, “Shut it down, weirdo!” Threatening to expose their asses is the internet equivalent of a badge of shame, but perhaps worse; trite as it is, you can’t take the internet off at the end of the day. Your name will always be out there, forever branded. Don’t believe me? Just Google “Michael Brutsch.”
Anonymous – Amanda Todd’s Punisher DOX
Screenshots [Vice]
Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web [Gawker]
via Jezebel http://jezebel.com/5952080/anonymous-names-names-outing-the-man-who-allegedly-drove-amanda-todd-to-suicide
From Dirty Book to Dirty Movie: Fifty Shades Gets a Female Screenwriter [Movies]
The soon-to-be major motion picture event Fifty Shades of Grey just got a screenwriter and her name, according to an announcement from Universal Pictures and its subsidiary Focus Features, is Kelly Marcel.
Marcel, as you may or may not know depending on how much slack you are willing to give bloated, uninteresting TV shows, served as co-creator and executive producer of Fox’s money-on-fire series Terra Nova. However, she also wrote the spec script for what sounds like a super-interesting movie, Saving Mr. Banks, which chronicles Walt Disney’s two-decade, dogged pursuit of the rights to author P.L. Travers’ novel Mary Poppins and will star Tom Hanks as Walt Disney’s severed, cryogenically preserved head.
Perhaps of more interest to Fifty Shades fans is that Marcel has had a working relationship with the pouty-lipped Tom Hardy (the pair recently formed a theater company together) ever since doing an emergency rewrite for Hardy’s film Bronson. Are your eyebrows raising? Could this be the latest Fifty Shades casting rumor run amuck? The Los Angeles Times, at least, does not speculate.
‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ movie lands its screenwriter [LA Times]
via Jezebel http://jezebel.com/5950054/from-dirty-book-to-dirty-movie-fifty-shades-gets-a-female-screenwriter
Research Suggests That People Who Believe in Luck Are Too Full of Malaise to Exercise [Luck]
An unlucky new study courtesy of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research has found that, on the whole, people who believe in luck — black cats sauntering across their paths, breaking mirrors, walking under ladders, or not simply waiting for all those pennies you dropped in your kitchen to eventually turn heads up — are more likely to live unhealthy lifestyles, since they believe life is just a crazy, random amusement ride with a whole section missing near the end and over which they have absolutely no control. Believing in luck, so this research suggests, is antithetical to bootstraps and rugged self-reliance.
According to Deborah Cobb-Clark, director of the Melbourne Institute, a link exists between people who let themselves buy snake oil to ward off all that black cat crossing guard luck and poor health. In other words, she explains, people are fat because they believe in luck rather than willpower, grit, and whatever other virtue people who spend four hours a day heaving kettlebells overhead and grunting like oxen:
The main policy response to the obesity epidemic has been the provision of better information, but information alone is insufficient to change people’s eating habits. Understanding the psychological underpinning of a person’s eating patterns and exercise habits is central to understanding obesity.
All those overweight people who think they just got stuck with a bad roll of the loaded gene dice are clearly kidding themselves. They just need better access to information, like pamphlets and Nordic personal trainers because thin people, well, just look at them! Clearly they have everything figured out because they’re sinewy enough to slip through wormholes and collect all the secrets of space and time.
Meanwhile, in the gender-specific portion of the study, researchers found that men wanted more often to see real, physical results from exercise, whereas women were content just to know that they were probably going to outlive most men anyway, but with exercise they would live to like a hundred and fifty.
Believers in luck = unhealthier lifestyle [UPI]
Image via CHRISTOPHE ROLLAND/Shutterstock.
Jan Brewer Is Proud That 99.9% of Gun Owners Don’t Shoot People [Politics]
Jan Brewer, Arizona governor and Glendale Community College’s most famous radiologic technologist certificate recipient, is actually The Worst. I know I’ve said that about a lot of people — Paul Ryan, Rick Scott, Scott Walker, Walker, Texas Ranger — but Brewer has gone above and beyond to show America again and again that she’s truly a terrible human being. Her most recent bit of virtuoso assholery? A New York Times Magazine interview wherein she defends her push to allow more Arizonans to carry concealed weapons that ran — awkwardly — on the same morning a gunman opened fire on civilians outside of the Empire State Building and the morning after 19 people were shot in Chicago, 13 of them within a single half hour.
The Andrew Goldman interview is noteworthy for its ballsiness. He asks the Arizona governor about her tacky, shouty confrontation with Barak Obama on an airport tarmac last year, her nakedly racist immigration policy, and her son’s incarceration for sexually assaulting a woman in the 1980’s (Brewer’s son is institutionalized, and during her governorship, she’s advocated to preserve state spending on mental health care facilities, but to cut state funding for organizations that assist rape victims). But the real meat of the profile is here —
You have been strongly against gun regulation. In light of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting outside Tucson and massacres in Colorado and Wisconsin, have you revised your position?
Not in regards to regulation. Those things would have happened whether guns were regulated or not. These madmen are going to find some way, somehow to create whatever it is they want to create.You signed a law that entitles people to carry concealed guns in bars as long as they don’t drink. I wouldn’t trust myself in a bar with access to a gun.
I think a bartender knows who’s drinking and who isn’t.But a bartender wouldn’t know who’s carrying a concealed weapon.
Ninety-nine point nine percent of the people that are gun owners are very responsible.
Wow, what an asshole. To follow that line of reasoning, we should probably get rid of the driver’s license requirement, speed limits, and center lines on roads because 99.9% of drivers are responsible about what side they’re supposed to drive on and when they should pass. Let’s also get rid of prescription requirements for addictive drugs like Xanax and Valium, because 99.9% of people who use them do so responsibly.
I’m sure that thought — that only 0.1% of gun owners are irresponsible fire-into-a-crowd types — is incredibly comforting to the victims of the Aurora shooting, or the Empire State Building shooting, or the families of people who died when that guy shot Gabrielle Giffords. It also must be comforting for the hundreds of families in Chicago — in mostly poor, Black, Mexican, or Puerto Rican neighborhoods — who are currently dealing loss or permanent injury of a loved one thanks to gun violence.
In Jan Brewer’s defense, she had no way of knowing that the Times piece would run on the same day as a mass shooting. But I’m sure she’s not bothered by it. After all, if everyone around the Empire State Building had concealed guns, they too could have fired into the crowd in pursuit of the random assailant, thus preventing more gun violence. See how that works?
[NYT]
via Jezebel http://jezebel.com/5937624/jan-brewer-is-proud-that-999-of-gun-owners-dont-shoot-people
Chelsea Clinton Is Starting to Realize that She Must Fulfill Her Political Destiny [Politics]
Chelsea Clinton may finally be ready to fulfill her political destiny and restore balance to the force, or, you know, at least run for office. In the September issue of Vogue, Clinton tantalizingly suggests that, if the planets aligned just and she had finally achieved the inner peace required to wade through the muck of a political campaign, she would maybe consider running for office.
When asked about her future in politics, Clinton said, “Before my mom’s campaign I would have said no. Not because it was something I had thought a lot about but because people have been asking me that my whole life.” She says that now, however, she’s not so quick to dismiss political ambitions:
I have voted in every election that I have been qualified to vote in since I turned eighteen. I believe that engaging in the political process is part of being a good person. And I certainly believe that part of helping to build a better world is ensuring that we have political leaders who are committed to that premise. So if there were to be a point where it was something I felt called to do and I didn’t think there was someone who was sufficiently committed to building a healthier, more just, more equitable, more productive world? Then that would be a question I’d have to ask and answer.
The big takeaway here is that Chelsea Clinton is a way better participating member of our civic process than even some of the most politically opinionated Americans. Clinton said that she’s been asked by reporters pretty much all her life whether she’d ever consider a future in politics, like in 1984 when, during her dad’s gubernatorial campaign, a reporter asked if she wanted to run for governor when she grew up and she politely answered, “No, I’m four.” That’s got to be quite a burdensome political legacy to live up to, so maybe she should stay away from national politics and instead run for comptroller in a town where she’d be such an overwhelming political juggernaut that she could run it like a mini-empire, the way the villain in Roadhouse runs his town.
Chelsea Clinton open to future career in politics [The Hill]
Writer Goes on Stalker-y Mission to Track Down the Women in Twitter Bot Profile Pictures [Twitter]
There are a lot of personages floating around social media sites, a disconcertingly significant number of them with no more life or substance than a discarded shell whose hermit crab tenant abandoned it a long time ago. These “bots” are used to help athletes and celebrities bolster their Twitter accounts, or trick lonely people into thinking that the great grandniece of the long-lost Princess Anastasia wants to be friends with them on Facebook (8.7 percent of Facebook’s entire user population, btw, is composed entirely of such bots). More often than not, these bots feature pictures of women, and though the bots themselves aren’t real, the women in the profile pictures are, a fact that spurred Jason Feifer of Fast Company to try and figure out who these women are and how some marketing bot appropriated their likeness.
Feifer is painfully aware of how stalkerish his quest is even before the first phone call he makes to a bike shop owner and possible distant friend of a Twitter bot woman. He’s not even sure what he’s doing beyond just sleuthing around for a link between a bot and a real, live human, and he certainly doesn’t know what will happen if he ever finds that link.
This is a mostly pointless exercise, I knew: The story behind every photo would be different. And what would one of these women say—that she’s flattered to find her face spamming everyone on Twitter? Clearly, no.
Bots, though, are becoming a more common presence on sites like Twitter because they’re cheap to both create and purchase. According to Feifer, companies like Buy Real Marketing sell bots in packages of 1,000 for $17 to 25,000 for $247. Nobody admits to it (obviously), but a publicist Feifer spoke to said that bots are really popular among athletes looking to raise their profile, and, in the case of large companies, purchasing bots is about as risk-free a marketing ploy as one can imagine. There isn’t any way to figure out if someone purchased bots or if they just accumulated bots by accident, but bot profiles like those that Feifer was combing through are pretty easy to spot because they usually have “a long digital tail, having been posted on dozens of sketchy porn sites or blogs devoted to the barely legal.”
Eventually, Feifer tracks down a woman named Amanda whose 2009 SUNshine Girls calendar photo was used on a bot profile. Feifer calls her boss (accidentally revealing Amanda’s stint as a SUNshine Girl), and finally makes a connection with a real person. That’s it, though. After admitting that having her SUNshine Girls photo — which, so far as Feifer could tell, had been used for at least a few different bot profiles — circulating the internet was pretty creepy, the best solution Feifer can offer her is to “report the bot as spam, and hope for the best.”
In the meantime, Twitter will be playing hot potato with a picture of lingerie-clad Amanda, and there’s not a whole lot she can do about it except think of the internet as a big, occasionally wonderful, occasionally horrifying amusement park, where personal information gets lost as easily as a sandal on an inverted roller coaster.
Who’s That Woman In The Twitter Bot Profile? [Fast Company]
Image via BestPhotoStudio/Shutterstock.
Mitt Romney Can’t Believe His Luck That Ann Is Driving Him Around on a Jet Ski [Snap Judgment]
Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and wife Ann Romney ride a jet ski on Lake Winnipesaukee in Wolfeboro, N.H., Monday, July 2, 2012, where Romney has a vacation home. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
via Jezebel http://jezebel.com/5923051/mitt-romney-cant-believe-his-luck-that-ann-is-driving-him-around-on-a-jet-ski