My lovely friend Debbie Cowens, half of the people behind Mansfield with Monsters, has a novel being PledgeMe’d into existence by Paper Road Press. “Murder and Matchmaking is a dark comedy that answers the question: if Mrs Bennett is so worried about what will happen to her if her daughters don’t marry … why doesn’t she really do something about it?” It’s already written and edited, the funding campaign is to get it printed and into bookstores. Check it out!
via Rachel B: Scientific experimentation to really figure out what’s up with those McDonalds hamburgers that don’t decompose.
via Shane: a trailer for the new Terminator film that finally makes sense of all those Terminator films
Hey, remember Cosmopolitan? It was like a website made out of paper updated every month? And it was an early master of the clickbait headline. Anyway, now I’ve reminded you, I bet you wonder what it’s doing these days! Well here’s something it’s doing: publishing NSFW images of Disney princesses enacting scenes from 50 Shades of Grey. Because who the hell knows.
The Ruminator: how the card game Presidents & Assholes describes a left-wing view of life. (Read to the bottom to find out what card game describes a right-wing view of life.)
The fat woman who designed the fitness game Zombies Run, on being a fat woman who designed a fitness game.
Laurie Penny & Meredith Yayanos bring you Fifty Shades of Socialist Feminism
Lots of “what is ISIS really” articles going around. Here’s one I read, at the Atlantic, who are usually pretty good. I have no idea how to evaluate how accurate it is.
EDITED TO ADD: I’ve seen quite a few responses to this article claiming it portrays ISIS as Islamic and thus Islam is the problem; but that’s now how I read this article at all. Here’s a good response that adds lots of great info to the discussion but, in my reading at least, doesn’t actually contradict the Atlantic piece at all.
SECOND EDIT: An overview of pushback on this piece, but I still think Wood’s point in this article was to say ISIS is Islamic in the same way that, like, people who bomb abortion clinics are Bible-literalist Christians. That said, finding this article celebrated by Fox News people and Richard Dawkins doesn’t give me much comfort.
The WaPo digs into what’s really going on with this new Harper Lee book, showing evidence that it’s actually a first draft of what became To Kill A Mockingbird. (I see this article has been syndicated all over the place! Good.)
Via Scott A: absolutely compelling evidence that Stevie Wonder is not blind OMG
And finally… Which freaky James Spader character are you?
Surprised you didn’t include that scientific experiment I sent you…
Maybe you ought to put it here in the comments so I can disclaim all responsibility
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-make-breakfast-with-your-vagina
My friend Janet Jay wrote this article about another friend, Cecilia Westbrook, who decided to do a home experiment to see if the flora in her vagina could be used to make yoghurt. It should have been just a fun and interesting little experiment, and hopefully draw attention to the fact that there is still a lot that’s unknown about women’s anatomy. Cecilia is a PhD candidate and a medical student, so she has some idea about these things.
As might be expected, it blew up online, with varied reactions (Ceci said the most surreal was hearing Sharon Osborne defending her vagina yoghurt on television). Unfortunately, and probably unsurprisingly to anyone who pays attention to how women are treated online, some of the attention was deeply unpleasant.
Ceci found herself the subject of accusations that she must be mentally ill to even consider such a thing. She started getting anonymous hate mail. There were even rumblings that it could have a negative effect on her university’s funding.
Despite all that, it’s an interesting article. Janet and Cecilia are both interesting and intelligent people and I hope that the good that comes from this ends up outweighing the bad.
wowsers, I didn’t have any of that context. That’s a really compelling description Pearce. I didn’t realise the crap response – although I should have assumed there’d be one because the internet sucks.