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San Isidro Bullfighter In "Grave Condition" After Being Gored Again

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Torero Jiménez Fortes is in serious condition after being gored in the jugular at the Feria de San Isidro bullfighting festival. It’s the second year in a row he’s been gored, and—warning!—it is pretty gruesome.

Last year’s San Isidro festival was cancelled following Fortes’s goring.

h/t to our pal Jesus.

To contact the author of this post, write to tim@deadspin.com (PGP key) or find him on Twitter @bubbaprog.


Cops Say Lunch Lady Gave Brothers More Than Just Lunch

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Cops Say Lunch Lady Gave Brothers More Than Just Lunch

Cops say a lunch lady at a Chicago high school did more than serve lunch to a pair of brothers, one of whom was apparently underage at the time.

Via the New York Daily News:

Joi Taylor, 32, allegedly had a tryst with a 16-year-old she met in March, the same month she started working as a lunchroom monitor in Proviso West High School in Hillside.

After meeting the student, the two exchanged phone numbers, and they would make video calls to each other in which Taylor masturbated as they talked, prosecutors said.

Later in the month, Taylor called the student before the school day and asked him to meet for sex, prosecutors said. She then allegedly met him the school’s parking lot, drove to the parking lot of a nearby church, had sex with him and then dropped him off at school.

According to reports, Taylor also engaged in an affair with the boy’s older brother, who was 18 at the time. Taylor allegedly threatened the boys that they might be ineligible for extracurricular activities if they told anyone what happened.

Criminal charges are currently pending an official investigation.


Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

King of the Blues B.B. King Dead at 89

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King of the Blues B.B. King Dead at 89

Legendary blues singer and guitarist B.B. King died late Thursday in his Las Vegas home. He was 89.

His daughter, Patty King, confirmed the news to CNN. King had entered into home hospice care two weeks earlier after suffering from reported dehydration and diabetes. He had be in debilitating health for the past year, and collapsed during a concert last October.

Born Riley B. King on a cotton plantation in Mississippi, he would go on to have a celebrated 70-year career that includes 15 Grammys and being an influential force in the making of guitarists like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton.

Indeed, King was perhaps most revered for his intimate, chilling guitar playing. He famously called his Gibson guitars Lucille, named after a woman he never met, but risked his life for: At a concert in Twist, Ark., in the early 1950s, two men fighting over a woman (Lucille) knocked over a kerosene stove and set the venue on fire. King risked his life to run back into the club and save his $30 Gibson.

King was regarded as the “undisputed” King of the Blues. “People all over the world have problems,” he said in the book Off the Record: An Oral History of Popular Music (1988). “And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.”


Image via Getty. Contact the author at aleksander@gawker.com .

Rambling Bill Cosby Evades Rape Questions In Bizarre ABC Interview

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Bill Cosby appeared on Good Morning America this morning to talk about his campaign to improve education in Alabama. He ended up talking a whole lot of nonsense after ABC News’ Linsey Davis asked him what he would say to child who asks him about the numerous women who have accused him of sexual assault.

He responded:

I am prepared to tell this young person the truth about life. I’m not sure that they will come like that. I think that many of them say, well, “You’re a hypocrite. You say one thing, you say the other.” My point is, okay, listen to me carefully. I’m telling you where the road is out. I’m telling you where, as you’re driving, you’re gonna go into water, and it looks like it might only be three inches deep, but you and your car are gonna go down. Now you wanna go here? Or you wanna be concerned about who’s giving you the message?

Hmm. What?

In trying to avoid actually talking about the allegations against him, Cosby struggled to put a coherent thought together. When Davis asked him if he was concerned the allegations would overshadow his message to improve education, he said:

I’ve been in this business 52 years. I’ve never seen anything like this. And reality is the situation. And I, I can’t speak.

He later added that he still has good ideas for TV programs.

I really know about what I’m going to do tomorrow. I have a ton of ideas to put on television about people and their love for each other.

More than 40 women have accused Cosby of sexual assault.

Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

Missouri’s Republican Speaker of the House, John Diehl, resigned Thursday after his incredibly borin

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Missouri’s Republican Speaker of the House, John Diehl, resigned Thursday after his incredibly boring sexts with a 19-year-old capitol intern became public. “I am willing to face the consequences,” he announced. :kiss emoji:

Deadspin Roger Goodell Reserves The Right To Screw Over Tom Brady Again | Gizmodo Watch Adam Savage

Missing U.S. Marine Helicopter Found in Nepal; No Signs of Survivors

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Missing U.S. Marine Helicopter Found in Nepal; No Signs of Survivors

The wreckage of the U.S. helicopter that vanished earlier this week in Nepal with six Marine and two Nepalese soldiers on board was found early Friday morning. Three bodies were discovered near the crash, and a U.S. military spokesman said there are no signs anyone survived.

“It is unlikely there are any survivors at this time,” U.S. Marine Lt. Gen. John Wissler told CNN.

The UH-1Y Huey helicopter disappeared Tuesday night—just after a powerful 7.3 aftershock struck Nepal—while delivering aid near the village Charikot. The U.S. has been helping with relief efforts in Nepal following the devastating 7.9 quake that hit the region on April 25, killing at least 8,100 people.


Image via AP. Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

15 Actors Who Tried To Become Action Stars And Failed Miserably

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15 Actors Who Tried To Become Action Stars And Failed Miserably

For every Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Daniel Craig, there are a dozen would-be action stars who tried to get their movie careers off the ground, but couldn’t quite manage it. Here are 15 actors who thought they could punch, shoot and leap into stardom, but reality had other plans.

1) Shaquile O’Neal, Steel

Shaquille O’Neal was very good at basketball. Acting? Not so much. In his attempt to transform himself into a movie star of any sort, he gave the action genre a try as the titular superhero of Steel in 1997. The performance was so dire he stopped try to play anyone other than himself until a bit part in Grown-Ups 2 in 2013.

2) Chris Klein, Rollerball

Remember when America tried to make Chris Klein happen? He seems like an affable guy, but his turn as the dopey Oz in the American Pie movies didn’t really convey his ability to anchor an action movie, especially one as ill-conceived as the 2002 Rollerball remake.

3) Pamela Anderson, Barb Wire

Playboy Playmate turned popular TV star Pamela Anderson thought movie star was the next rung in her ladder when she accepted the title role of Barb Wire, based on the racy comic heroine. Suffice it to say, it was not nearly as warmly received as her sex tape with Tommy Lee.

4) Shia LaBeouf, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Although the Transformers films are certainly action movies, and they’ve been wildly successful, you couldn’t appropriately call Shia LaBeouf (“The Beef”) an action movie star in them. He was there mainly as an audience surrogate while Michael Bay blew crap up. But Steven Spielberg thought he had enough potential that he cast Shia as Indiana Jones’ son Mutt in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Not that anybody would have looked good trying to swing on jungle vines like a monkey, but Shia somehow made it even worse.

5) Brian Bosworth, Stone Cold

As a former NFL linebacker, Brian Bosworth is one of many pro athletes who hoped to make it big in Hollywood with the 1991 film Stone Cold. Given that maybe three of the people reading this even remember this movie ever existed, I think you can guess how that went.

6) Jay Leno, Collision Course

Any time you read a list of the lousiest action films ever made, Collision Course is going to come up, and deservedly so. Collision Course was an action-comedy that paired Jay Leno with The Karate Kid’s Pat Morita, in the vein of every mismatched buddy-cop movie ever. It wasn’t funny, it wasn’t action-packed, and it wasn’t even finished until years after the shoot, where it limped straight to home video. As you might have noticed, Leno didn’t quit his day job,

7) Alex Pettyfer

In researching this article, I found many people stating that Alex Pettyfer was a failed action movie star. He was in I Am Number Four, Beastly, and something called Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker, all of which bombed. Given the fact that I had no idea Pettyfer existed until yesterday, I’m going to say, his bid to be an action star was not a success.

8) Kristen Kreuk, Legend of Chun Li

Despite the immense popularity of the Street Fighter videogame franchise, it seems Legend Films made this movie under duress. They gave it practically no budget, which prevented any big actors from appearing in it. This allowed former Smallville star Kreuk her big break, while also immediately ending her movie career, because neither she nor the movie were at all good.

9) Sam Worthington

Sam Worthington is the star of Avatar, which is not only an action flick from the king of action flicks, James Cameron, but is the highest grossing movie of all time. He starred in the terrible but popular Clash of the Titans remake and the terrible but somewhat profitable Teminator: Salvation reboot. How can he be considered a failure? Well, because since then he’s basically disappeared. Despite his insane, unwarranted successes, no one is hiring him anymore. I don’t know exactly why directors have stopped casting him, but I assume it has something to do with him have the acting ability of a rotted log.

10) Vanilla Ice, Cool as Ice

Vanilla Ice was once not only popular, but a popular rapper. So popular, in fact, he was allowed to star in an action movie. This was a huge mistake for everyone involved.

11) Taylor Kitsch

I hate that Taylor Kitsch is on this list, because anyone who’s seen him on Friday Night Lights knows he’s a genuinely good actor. And while Battleship was exactly as dumb as a movie based on a board game would be expected to be, John Carter was actually quite good, but bombed because of the world’s crappiest marketing campaign. But two major box office duds in row cut Kitsch’s action movie career short. Happily, he seems to be bouncing back with a variety dramatic roles, including one in the upcoming second season of True Detective.

12) Justin Long, Live Free or Die Hard

I have no idea how the nerdy Justin Long, of Apple commercial fame, managed to co-star in a Die Hard movie alongside Bruce Willis. I can’t imagine anyone, even a Hollywood executive, being so whacked out on cocaine that they honestly believed Long was the new face of the franchise. It’s like some terrible prank memo got way out of hand and the studio didn’t notice they’d accidentally hired Long until half the movie was already shot. At any rate, they wised up and Willis got a new, brawnier sidekick in A Good Day to Die Hard. I imagine Justin Long is also completely okay with this.

13) Alicia Silverstone, Batman & Robin

I won’t pretend that casting the star of Clueless as Batgirl is the biggest of Batman & Robin’s sins, but man, she made Chris O’Donnell look like Joseph Gordon-Levitt in comparison. Suffice it to say, after that she stuck to projects that didn’t force her to run around in a leather bodysuit with sculpted ass cheeks.

14) Hulk Hogan, No Holds Barred

After fighting Rocky in Rocky III, wrestling superstar Hulk Hogan had a taste for Hollywood. With help from the WWE, he managed to get a starring vehicle as — wait for it — a wrestler in No Holds Barred. It was not a good movie, but it was one more suited to Hogan’s acting talents than his later action-comedies Mr. Nanny and Suburban Commando, which were mere blips on his immediate downward spiral into cinematic irrelevancy.

15) Taylor Lautner, Abduction

The shirt-challenged werewolf of the Twilight saga parlayed the franchise’s immense popularity into his bid to become an action movie star. In the frenzy of Twilight mania, Lautner was hired to lead a variety of action flicks, including Max Steel and Stretch Armstrong, both based on action figures. Then people saw him star in Abduction, and realized out that Lautner was a less talented (although less bland) Sam Worthington. Everything Lautner was attached to was quietly placed on the backburner.


Contact the author at rob@io9.com.



Naked, Blood-Soaked Teen Allegedly High on Flakka to Cops: "I’M SATAN!"

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Naked, Blood-Soaked Teen Allegedly High on Flakka to Cops: "I’M SATAN!"

A naked, blood-covered 17-year-old girl was arrested Saturday morning in Melbourne, Fla., after she allegedly jumped through the glass window of an unoccupied house, punched a stranger and a car, and then ran at police officers while repeatedly screaming “I’M SATAN!” and “I AM GOD.”

Officers tased the teen before arresting her and taking her to Holmes Regional Medical Center, where, four hours later, she told them she’d taken what she’d believed to be LSD. Based on her behavior, though, police said it’s more likely she inadvertently took flakka, the newly-popular synthetic stimulant.


“Whatever she was on, it was some mind-altering narcotic. The characteristics which exhibited are just like flakka,” Melbourne police Cmdr. Dan Lynch told Florida Today. “The chiefs are discussing it and it’s definitely a concern. Our narcotics units are doing an enforcement campaign and notified our school resource officers. But we only have 12 more days of school before the summer break begins.”

According to WKMG, the teen was charged with burglary, battery, and criminal mischief.

And if you were wondering why every flakka story involves someone being arrested while naked, here’s your answer: “One of the characteristics is that it raises your inner core temperature…so that causes them to take their clothes off,” Lynch said. Good to know.


Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

FBI and Homeland Security Respond to Shocking Goatse Bomb in Atlanta

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FBI and Homeland Security Respond to Shocking Goatse Bomb in Atlanta

The affluent denizens of Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood received a fun treat this week when they looked up at the corner of Peachtree and East Paces Ferry: a famous internet man’s giant, ruddy, gaping spread asshole, displayed on an enormous digital billboard.

The billboard above is one of the thousands of YESCO digital billboards installed across the country. Naturally, it comes with an internet connection. The setup is exactly as insecure as you’d imagine: many of these electronic billboards are completely unprotected, dangling on the public internet without a password or any kind of firewall. This means it’s pretty simple to change the image displayed from a new AT&T offer to, say, Goatse.

The appearance of this unexpected mammoth human asshole alarmed Buckhead residents so much that at least one called 911, WSB-TV reports:

“There’s an electronic billboard that is flashing a naked man,” one woman said in the 911 call. “It’s not actually an emergency; it’s just totally disgusting.” Police say the billboard’s owner temporarily cut power to the billboard.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that both the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are now both involved in chasing down the party responsible for briefly putting the graphic butt meme on a billboard—a poster on Reddit already took responsibility:

Hello friends,

We are the Assange Shuffle Collective, and we’re responsible for the happy afternoon entertainment.Ironically, we didn’t realize that Buckhead was an incredibly affluent neighborhood, which makes the whole thing terrifically good fun.Burn the rich.

But what is there to really investigate? The billboard was easy to mess with; the owners basically left the door unlocked and wide open. Not only was this a case of incompetence, but gross negligence: security researcher Dan Tentler tweeted yesterday that he’d tried to warn this very same sign company that their software is easily penetrable by anyone with a computer and net connection and was told they were “not interested.”

FBI and Homeland Security Respond to Shocking Goatse Bomb in Atlanta

Even after the billboard was defaced, Tentler said the company still hadn’t secured its software. Well, it’s 2015, and when you’re “not interested” in the fact that you electronic billboards are easy to hack, well buddy, you’re gonna get Goatse on your billboard.

Ugandan Man Openly Admits To "Serious Raping" of Lesbians

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In tonight’s episode of Vice (in a segment titled A Prayer for Uganda), Isobel Yeung travels to Uganda to investigate life in the wake of last year’s Jail the Gays bill. Though it was eventually overturned, anti-gay sentiment thrives and there’s a new similar law on the docket. The preview above is a taste of how bad things are—a man in Kampala tells Yeung that he wouldn’t hesitate to kill another man he knew to be gay. As for women: “If we find a woman with a woman, we pull out one and do it to her. We have sex with her. We cannot allow a woman to have sex with a fellow woman.”

There’a a follow-up clip with an anonymous lesbian rape survivor:

Utterly heinous.

[via Out]

Sean Bean Keeps Spoiling Game of Thrones Because, Who Cares, He's Dead

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Sean Bean Keeps Spoiling Game of Thrones Because, Who Cares, He's Dead

Sean Bean, man of a thousand on-screen deaths and the erstwhile Lord Eddard Stark, continues to discuss Game of Thrones in interviews long after his head has fully rotted on a pike in King’s Landing. And he continues to drop the same huge spoiler about Jon Snow. Because: who cares? He dead!

“I’m obviously not Jon Snow’s dad,” Bean casually said last July, trolling the shit out of non-book-readers. (Many of the clues to what’s probably Ned’s bastard’s true parentage are in the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire, and that same foreshadowing hasn’t kicked into gear on the show until this season.)

And even though everyone was like “Shh, Sean Bean! Not everyone knows that yet!” he let it slip again this week, talking to Vulture:

“He’s not my child. He isn’t. That’s what I suspected all along,” Bean said, when he was told the show’s finally starting to deal with that plot point.

“Probably a bit psychologically confused, I would imagine!” he said, when asked how fans are probably feeling about the new information that he already spoiled last year.

Just kidding. He was talking about Jon Snow’s feelings as he goes from knowing nothing to maybe knowing something.

“I think that’s probably an interesting journey for Jon Snow as a character and for [Kit Harington] as the actor. He’s been very fortunate in being one of the characters that had a very meaty, substantial, very complex story to be able to discover for himself. He’s been lucky to survive!”

Bean previously said he’d be happy to appear in flashbacks on the show. There’s one very obvious way for that to occur, but we already know it won’t happen this season.

[h/t Vulture]

We Are the Same But Different

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We Are the Same But Different

A bear—just chilling—happened on a man—also just chilling—and the two spooked the hell out of each other. This is just one more example of game acknowledging game, and agreeing that it is best to stay out of it.

Why does this bear not know that he could dominate a puny man in one second? What gives, bear?

Amazon Has an Unquenchable Thirst For Woody Allen

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Amazon Has an Unquenchable Thirst For Woody Allen

If I asked you to close your eyes and envision the worst possible celebrity interview scenario, what would it be? The right answer is of course Deadline’s Mike Fleming, Jr. interviewing Woody Allen.

The full Q-and-A is very long and very boring. A salivating Fleming asks Allen questions about filmmaking, his casting process (“The person walks in and I do a quick look, just to see them live”), and his new movie starring Emma Stone.

But this interview did manage to do some good, in that it surfaced Amazon Studio’s very embarrassing desperation to work with a man accused of sexually abusing his daughter. (But not to worry! Fleming doesn’t bother to bring up any of that unpleasantness in his questions. Good journalism.)

So, how do you convince a creep to bring his directorial vision to your fledging television studio? Keep throwing money at him until he says yes. To wit:

DEADLINE: How do you reconcile your avoidance of computers and iPads, when you signed on to create a TV series for Amazon’s streaming service?

ALLEN: I don’t even know what a streaming service is; that’s the interesting thing. When you said streaming service, it was the first time I’ve heard that term connected with the Amazon thing. I never knew what Amazon was. I’ve never seen any of those series, even on cable. I’ve never seen The Sopranos, or Mad Men. I’m out every night and when I come home, I watch the end of the baseball or basketball game, and there’s Charlie Rose and I go to sleep. Amazon kept coming to me and saying, please do this, whatever you want. I kept saying I have no ideas for it, that I never watch television. I don’t know the first thing about it. Well, this went on for a year and a half, and they kept making a better deal and a better deal. Finally they said look, we’ll do anything that you want, just give us six half hours. They can be black and white, they can take place in Paris, in New York and California, they can be about a family, they can be comedy, you can be in them, they can be tragic. We don’t have to know anything, just come in with six half hours. And they offered a lot of money and everybody around me was pressuring me, go ahead and do it, what do you have to lose?

DEADLINE: So you said yes…

ALLEN: And I have regretted every second since I said OK. It’s been so hard for me. I had the cocky confidence, well, I’ll do it like I do a movie…it’ll be a movie in six parts. Turns out, it’s not. For me, it has been very, very difficult. I’ve been struggling and struggling and struggling. I only hope that when I finally do it — I have until the end of 2016 — they’re not crushed with disappointment because they’re nice people and I don’t want to disappoint them. I am doing my best. I fit it in between films, so it’s not like, no film this year, I’m doing Amazon. It’s a job within my usual schedule. But I am not as good at it as I fantasized I might be. It’s not a piece of cake; it’s a tough thing and I’m earning every penny that they’re giving me and I just hope that they don’t feel, ‘My God, we gave him a very substantial amount of money and freedom and this is what he gives us?’

we’ll do anything that you want, just give us six half hours

“With some people,” Amazon Studio’s Joe Lewis told New York Magazine earlier this month, referring to the studio’s deal with Allen, “it’s worth it to roll the dice and let the person surprise you.”

Amazon, I promise you, Woody Allen has no more surprises.


Image via Getty. Contact the author at aleksander@gawker.com .

Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Sentenced to Death

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Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Sentenced to Death

After weeks of testimony and three days of deliberations, a federal jury sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death by lethal injection today. Last month, the 21-year-old was found guilty of 30 charges related to the bombing at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon.

The verdict will automatically be appealed to a higher federal court, according to Boston.com, staring a process of appeals that will likely take years to resolve. If the sentence stands, Tsarnaev would be the first federal inmate to be executed since 2001, when Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was killed.


Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.


500 Days of Kristin, Day 110: [Vocal Fry] Justin Bobby

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500 Days of Kristin, Day 110: [Vocal Fry] Justin Bobby

Truth and time tells all, but The Hills’ Justaan Bobbay will live forever. Kristin’s former coworker and (alleged) ex-boyfriend Justin Bobby Brescia recently emerged from wherever he’s been to do an interview with Us Weekly about his current career as a hairstylist. His salon is right in his Manhattan loft.

JB didn’t say much during the interview, which took place in said loft, but he did cut his interviewer’s hair and reveal that he is in a band called Bobby Rock.

500 Days of Kristin, Day 110: [Vocal Fry] Justin Bobby

When the topic of ex-girlfriends came up, JB chose to talk about Kristin’s one-time rival for his attention, Audrina Patridge. “There were some points” where he and Audrina were dating for real, he said. “We worked so much together for such a long time that we’d work all these hours and then we’d go have dinner and do things together, but our schedules kind of collided.”

But did he ever really date Kristin? Us Weekly didn’t ask. (Weird—guess they don’t care.) Kristin’s on record saying the relationship was fake; in 2012, she told Bravo’s Andy Cohen, “I never really dated [Justin Bobby].”

Hmm. Then why is Kristin featured on his current haircare website?

500 Days of Kristin, Day 110: [Vocal Fry] Justin Bobby

A mystery like Mr. Bob himself. Maybe the truth will come out in Kristin’s book...in time......


This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

For Two Years, This Kanye West Game Has Been Hiding a Disturbing Secret

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For Two Years, This Kanye West Game Has Been Hiding a Disturbing Secret

Guys. I’m kind of freaked out right now.

That’s partially my fault. I’m in a confusing part of the internet right now, and it’s midnight, and I’m trying to figure out this creepy game I’m playing. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It was in Rolling Stone. It was on Vice. It was on The Hollywood Reporter. It’s been viewed over a million times across various big YouTube channels. It was even on Kotaku.com...almost two years ago.

In 2013, a humble little (unofficial) JRPG called Kanye Quest made a splash online thanks in large part to its novel premise. Basically, on his way to take out the trash, fictional Kanye somehow travels through a wormhole into the future. Yeah, really. In this future, Kanye gets sucked into a prophecy that involves clones, Tupac, and all sorts of other rap figures like Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre—all of which Kanye can duke it out with via turn-based rap battle.

Many people played through the hilarious game, defeated Lil’ B, and saw the ending. You can see a normal playthrough here, courtesy of videogamedunkey:

You’d think that would be that, but for whatever reason, the game started floating around again earlier this year. On January 28th, 2015, an anonymous user uploaded a Pastebin where they described what happened after they got an itch to play through the game again, randomly. According to this person, they had played the game before, but had never beaten it. So they decided to change that. It’s a kind of suspicious story, but roll with it for a second here.

After getting to an early portion of the game, they noticed that one of the terminals that Kanye can interact with displayed this message:

For Two Years, This Kanye West Game Has Been Hiding a Disturbing Secret

At first glance, that seems like gibberish. But it’s not. “I realized it said ‘ASCEND and worship The Based God,’” the poster wrote on Pastebin. “I thought ‘oh, cool fluff messages’ and just kept walking.”

A little later in the game, you come across a lady that asks you a question:

For Two Years, This Kanye West Game Has Been Hiding a Disturbing Secret

The game then gives you a prompt.

For Two Years, This Kanye West Game Has Been Hiding a Disturbing Secret

You can enter anything you’d like, and the character will simply say she wants that too:

For Two Years, This Kanye West Game Has Been Hiding a Disturbing Secret

It seems like a joke, which is probably why nobody thought anything of this portion of the game when it first made the rounds. For whatever reason, the anonymous player decided to input “ascend” onto this prompt, as it was one of the potential words displayed on the gibberish screen from before. To their surprise, the screen flashed, and they were teleported here:

For Two Years, This Kanye West Game Has Been Hiding a Disturbing Secret

Now, when it comes to a game that’s about battling rap clones that are thousands of years old, maybe having a portion of the game involve a butterfly doesn’t seem outlandish. But what you have to understand is that prior to this Pastebin from January, nobody had come across this part of the game before. Nobody had seen this. Nobody knew it was in there; there are no references to this portion of the game in any of the write-ups or YouTube videos that originally covered it.

It is here that the game reveals its true nature to the player, however. Here, the player is greeted with the following text:

Congratulations! You have proven yourself to be an open-minded and curious thinker. We must apologise for deceiving you, but we can reveal that the game you were playing until this point was a ‘front’ constructed to protect what you are currently accessing. We must ask that you do not reveal this area to the public. If you believe that you may be prone to revealing information, or do not wish to participate, please close this program immediately by pressing ALT-F4 or selecting the NO option when it appears. By selecting the YES option, you agree to participate and not reveal information.

Here is what the game says if you select ‘YES’:

The following is a thought exercise designed to help teach you something beneficial. By undertaking this exercise, you will hopefully be affected in a positive way. Due to the nature of the exercise, this “something” cannot be revealed immediately. This exercise may or may not be restricted to this software. It is important to remember that the purpose of this exercise is to benefit you. You will not be timed. We cannot provide any more information, except that we wish you good luck. You may begin now. Welcome to your ascension.

It is at this point in the story that the Pastebin seems like a load of bullshit, yeah? Like the sort of thing that practically screams “I AM A SHITTY ATTEMPT AT CREEPYPASTA.” Still, I was intrigued—I’m a sucker for these sorts of things. So I downloaded Kanye Quest 3030 once more, and I tried out the steps outlined in the Pastebin. And...they worked.

I shit you not. They worked. I’ve done it multiple times, and every time the game takes me to the strange screen. It’s all in there: the butterfly, the terminals, the drab color scheme. As far as I can tell, all of this stuff was in the game to begin with, people just didn’t find it—the independently-owned site I downloaded this from, RPGMaker.net, says the file was uploaded on 7/22/2013, and has not been updated since.

The curious thing about the secret portion of the game is that it is full of terminals that the player can go up to and interact with. None of them do anything—they simply give you a roman numeral, and then ask you to input a word. Without this word, you can’t move forward. There are a ton of these terminals, each one acting as a gate.

For Two Years, This Kanye West Game Has Been Hiding a Disturbing Secret

[Source: Ben Nine]

Stuck and unsure of what to do, the original poster says they tried contacting the developer to no avail. They tried contacting other people involved with the game, and didn’t get very far either. Eventually they decided to data mine the game, and that’s where they found a number of passwords that all corresponded to each of the terminals. The passwords are a mix of common, every day words like ‘hatch” and “idle,” and strange words like “Jagatai” and “Flacon.”

I spent over 40 minutes inputting each and everyone one of the passwords into their individual terminals to make sure this was all legit, and every time I got through one of these segments, the screen got progressively darker and darker:

For Two Years, This Kanye West Game Has Been Hiding a Disturbing Secret

For Two Years, This Kanye West Game Has Been Hiding a Disturbing Secret

Eventually, I could barely make out anything—the only thing I could hear was the repeated unsettling tone that the game plays over and over in this section of the game. On the final terminal screen, however, the game flashes once more and teleports you to...a blank screen. When this happened to me, I thought I had crashed the game or something. It didn’t seem like I could move. But when I pressed the inventory button, the game brought the menu up, so it was indeed working. I wandered aimlessly on this white screen for a while, and every so often the game would throw a random encounter at me. The enemy was also blank—no sprite. It was named “JFZZJNMS,” and it would disappear immediately after going into battle. I have no idea why that’s in there or what it means, but it’s in there.

For Two Years, This Kanye West Game Has Been Hiding a Disturbing Secret

Anyway, after wandering around on this blank hellscape for a little bit, I eventually came across a final terminal, which I promptly used. I was so excited I booted up Bandicam to try to record it, but I didn’t realize that my hotkey for recording is also the same hotkey for closing the game—so I didn’t get to see all of what the final terminal says first hand, though I can confirm that it exists and you can interact with it.

The Pastebin says this is what the terminal says when you use it:

You have proven your worth once again. You have ascended. However, further ascension is always possible. If you do not wish to ascend further, your journey ends here, so please close this program by pressing ALT-F4 or selecting the NO option above. By selecting the YES option, you agree to participate further and you grant us permission to interact with your possessions. Would you like to participate?

If you choose NO, you get sent to the title screen. If you choose YES, it shows this:

Over the following two week time period, we will interact with you and your possessions in several ways. Keep an eye out, as some of these ways may be subtle. Others may not be. We may attempt to contact you directly. If we do this, we will attempt to notify you of our prescence using a key-word. If you still consent to participation, please select the YES option above. Do you wish to participate?

Apparently, if you say yes, the game asks you for your name and your address. The Pastebin says that if you give the game your information, it thanks you and says “Enjoy the next two weeks and await instruction.” Weird, huh?

Somehow, this gets stranger. The Pastebin notes that it does not seem like the information actually gets sent anywhere, nor has the poster noticed anything strange in their everyday life since discovering the game. But still: what is the point of this creepy optional area? I tried contacting the developer, but they didn’t get back to me. The last update on the official website was on 08/23/13. (Curiously, the theme on the Tumblr is called “Accent.”)

I can only speculate as to the purpose of the optional area. It could have been that the developer was just having some fun. It could be that they included it to bring more attention to the game, on the off-chance someone found it. The entire discovery on the Pastebin seems a little suspicious to me. That said, the area itself is genuinely unnerving, especially when compared to the rest of the game.

The Pastebin has a very particular interpretation of the hidden area of the game. According to this anonymous poster, the game seems like it’s a recruitment tool for a cult. Specifically, the Ascension Cult—hence the name of the first password, and the repeated mentions of the word “ascending,” not just in the game, but in some of the promotional materials for the game, too.

Here is how the Pastebin describes the cult—do note that I cannot confirm if this is at all relevant. If I reprint it here, it’s because I’m reporting what the most popular theory about the Kanye West JRPG is, as of a few months ago:

Ascensionism is a New Age cult that goes back to at least 2006. Its main beliefs focus around there being two spirits that make up a whole being. A physical spirit, the body, and an ethereal spirit, the soul. Long story short, souls live lifetime after lifetime until they reach a point where they are judged by themselves after a death and, upon deciding they have been sufficiently good, destroy themselves and become primordial soulstuffs from which new souls form.

Apparently, orthodox Ascensionism believes that all souls, before combining with the spirit of the body, form pacts with the souls of all beings that they will encounter into the future. This leads to the ascentionist belief that any harm done to a person was agreed upon prior by their soul during a contract signing with the other person’s soul and that they were, quite literally, “asking for it”, thus justifying any harm they can perpetrate against people.

They also believe that if a person is cloned, their soul is split into two parts, and as such, they do not truly die until the clones are dead because any soul from a dead clone or originator will just wander until it finds another clone with the same host spirit and will combine with it.

This is bad, to ascentionists. They believe that if a soul lives on for too long, it becomes corrupted by the bad circumstances it has accumulated and will become evil and twisted over time because they cannot be purged of their experiences by death to start anew. They believe that souls that become evil and are wandering from clone to clone are the “shadow people” that people see in the corners of their eyes. According to them, there is some ancient group of 9 people or so who have lived for centuries by cloning themselves repeatedly and indefinitely, and their clones are what constitute the majority of the “shadow people” seen today (not really centuries, per se, because ascentionists measure time in eons that are determined by a certain number of lifetimes a spirit has, but you get me.) This goes back to the plotline of the game, where all of the evil characters were continued clones of rappers who had accumulated evil by being alive for so long and never truly dying, while the good characters, aside from Kanye, were clones that had been dormant for so long that they couldn’t accumulate the bad energies gained through experience.

The Pastebin postulates that maybe the game was an alternate reality game used by a cult as a recruitment tool, the idea being that anyone that solves it would be worthy of gaining membership. Truthfully, I don’t know if I buy this. Part of the proof that the Pastebin uses is a different ARG game, which it claims was used by cultists as a means of recruiting members. That ARG supposedly uses a lot of the same weird words that this Kanye West JRPG does. But when I looked into it, all of the things documenting the older ARG are dead links. In general, a lot of the ‘evidence’ used about cults in the Pastebin leads to dead ends, threads that mysteriously stop updating suddenly, or links that go nowhere.

This might be enough to make you think twice about accepting the popular theory around this game, but I leave that part up to you. Other crackpot theories include the possibility that maybe the game was meant to be an ARG for the movie Jupiter Ascending. But even if it’s not a weird cult thing/marketing for some brand, the fact the game was hiding this all along is still really creepy. The area itself is eerie, and going through it makes you wonder why in the world anyone would make something like this. And lets be real, the dead ends surrounding this game only make it seem that much weirder, no?

If the entire thing is a hoax meant to drum up more attention for Kanye Quest, then I applaud the developer. On its own, the game was already really cool—that’s why it blew up originally. This new element discovered earlier this year elevates the game further, and makes it one of the best Creepypastas on the internet right now. But unlike most internet scary stories, you can actually experience a good chunk of it on your own, if you’d like. The game is downloadable, after all.

Have fun. Don’t give your info out to any weird cultists while you’re at it.

[Image via Getty]

Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos

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Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos

Occasionally, against all odds, you’ll see an interesting or even enjoyable picture on the Internet. But is it worth sharing, or just another Photoshop job that belongs in the digital trash heap? Check in here and find out if that viral photo deserves an enthusiastic “forward” or a pitiless “delete.”

Image via YouTube


FORWARD

Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos

Fake X-ray photos have a long and rich history on the internet, but this image depicts a real incident that occurred recently at the border of Morocco and the Spanish territory of Ceuta.

“When they put the suitcase through the scanner, the operator noticed something strange, which seemed to be a person inside the case,” a police spokesperson told AFP. “When it was opened they found a minor, in a terrible state.

According to authorities, the 8-year-old boy’s father—who has residence rights in Europe—paid a 19-year-old woman to smuggle his son over the border. Last Friday, a judge ordered the man held for violating the rights of a foreign citizen.

Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos

Images via Twitter


DELETE

Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos

Whimsical Oreo flavors, however, have an equally long and arguably much richer history. Some, like last year’s red velvet variety, end up being the real deal, while others, like the beefy remix seen above, are just the product of Photoshop.

As Snopes reported this week, the mockup originated from a video by YouTube food reviewers Wreckless Eating.

“We know the person who made it and did it ourselves,” wrote Wreckless Eating in a Facebook post on Monday. “The picture is of course fake lol.”

Image via Twitter


DELETE

Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos

In the wake of the clinch-heavy bout between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao earlier this month, one of the most widely stolen jokes online was a one-liner about how Mayweather should “hug his wife and punch Pacquiao, not the other way around.” Eventually (as all things on the internet must) the quip became a viral image, supposedly produced by Pacquiao himself.

Naturally, the photo is a simple manipulation. In the original, taken in April, Pacquiao expressed his support for Filipino rock band Siakol and The Youth, who the boxer has performed with in the past.

Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos

Images via Twitter/Facebook


FORWARD

Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos

Almost immediately after this picture hit Reddit on Sunday, proud Midwesterners began pouring in to say the pictured storm was impossible and had to be the result of Photoshop. However, photographer Thomas Zimmerman maintains the image of Saturday’s tornado in Grinnell, Kansas is a photo “rendered with artistic intent” but that the twister itself was very real:

The photo is an HDR photo, if you are unfamiliar with the process you take several photos at different shutter speeds to get different brightness levels inside the scene, and then layer them with software and manual techniques so that you catch the entire dynamic range of the photo (details in the bright and dark areas of the clouds, and of the shack, etc.). It was then edited to be ominous, and moody. My intent with the photograph is to make the viewer feel what I feel when I was there in the moment, and it was a pretty freaky scene.

The one thing that I will tell everyone absolutely is it is NOT a composite photo, where the tornado scene in the sky, and the shack would have been photographed separately and then brought together in post.

Image via Twitter


DELETE

Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos

As multiple Twitter users quickly noticed, this supposed “vintage ad” for Budweiser still has the logo from the Cracked.com Photoshop contest it came from. C’mon, shitty fake photo accounts you can at least try.

Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos

Images via Twitter//h/t @PicPedant

Why We Should Have Seen Betty Draper's Mad Men Fate From a Mile Away

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Why We Should Have Seen Betty Draper's Mad Men Fate From a Mile Away

On the penultimate episode of Mad Men, viewers were shocked by a Betty Draper curveball, that, as far as I can tell by trolling dozens of unhinged messages boards online, very few viewers saw coming. But, in retrospect, Matthew Weiner, brilliant former Sopranos scribe, Mad Men creator, and mild sadist had been giving us clues since the first season.

In Monday morning quarterbacking the newest twist like a fiend this week, diving back through synopses of every single Mad Men episode, searching to make sense of what had just happened, I see now that other popular fan theories—that Megan is Sharon Tate, that Don is DB Cooper, that the falling man represents anything but human beings (and therefore society’s) inability to escape their nature and therefore their fate—only served as distractions as Betty’s storyline moved, grimly, toward its resolution. Are the following observations intentional clues or just the mental grasping of a TV and film viewer who annoys the shit out of her boyfriend by trying to “guess” what the twist is in Hitchcock films from the first scene? Who knows!

Obviously, if you haven’t seen last week’s pre-series finale episode, you should stop reading here, cover your eyes, and scream until you pass out to avoid the spoilers that follow.

Let’s start my descent into madness at Season 1.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

The very first episode of the series was called “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.” The first conversation that Don Draper has onscreen is one about smoking. Don’s waiter notes that Reader’s Digest says smoking will kill you, but that he loves it. Later in the episode, a researcher tells Don and company that smoking is perhaps the expression of a death wish. Another episode in Season features a dramatic reenactment of Paul Kinsey’s shitty play “Death is my Client.” Lucky Strike, at the time, is Sterling Cooper’s biggest client! “Lucky Strike can shut off our lights,” Don tells Sal while firing him in Season 3. In Season 4, Sterling Cooper Draper Price’s dependence on Lucky Strike nearly kills the company.

Anyway: here is a small selection of photos of Betty Draper Francis with her favorite accessory.

Why We Should Have Seen Betty Draper's Mad Men Fate From a Mile Away

Smoking is what led to Betty’s deadly disease. Smoking! Betty! Danger! Death! It was all there from episode one! But, you might be thinking, smugly, everybody is smoking on Mad Men. And a few people have died of cancer, including Rachel, the real Mrs. Draper, and the people who raised Don. Way ahead of you.

Betty’s Indomitable Vanity

Halfway through Season 1, reflecting on the death of her mother (which occurred months before the first episode occurred and affects Betty emotionally throughout the duration of the series), Betty tells Don that she’s glad her mother remained “handsome” until near her death. In another episode, Betty reflects on how relieved she is that Sally was not killed, but more importantly, unscarred by an accidental car crash. Later in the series, Betty becomes enraged with Sally when she sustains facial injuries, lamenting that Betty had given Sally a “perfect nose” and that Sally was threatening to ruin it. In the penultimate episode Betty learns her prognosis—that the cancer is aggressive and her death will likely come swiftly—it makes perfect sense that she’d forego treatment. She wants to die beautiful, and because of that, Betty had a literal and barely-disguised death wish. The note she wrote to Sally focuses almost entirely how she’d like to look when buried, right down to the lipstick she likes. Which brings me to...

Belle Jolie Lipstick

Season 1 saw Lean In pioneer Peggy Olsen given her first copywriting job for Belle Jolie lipstick. “Women don’t want to be one of many in a box,” Peggy says, in reference to a proposed tagline that diminished Belle Jolie users’ individuality. Betty’s much-later expressed desire to be buried in a specific lipstick shade is her, literally about to go in a box, expressing a desire to be singularly her. That Peggy Olsen. So prescient.

The Whole Glen Thing

Betty’s creepy relationship with Glen the child and then Glen the young man reaches its apex in Season 1, when Glen asks Betty to give him a lock of her hair after she babysat him and is later banned from interacting with the child as a result. In Victorian times, locks of hair of the deceased were carried by bereaved relatives, and so Betty’s gifting of hair could have carried the double meaning of being both a love token and... a death token.

Later in the series, a now-18-year-old Glen attempts to plant a big gross smooch on Betty in the Francis kitchen before heading off to Vietnam. “You’re going to make it; I’m positive,” says Betty. “Glen’s going to die,” I said assuredly to my boyfriend when we watched this scene. Wrong! It was Betty! Good misdirect, Mad Men writers.

Bye Bye Birdie

A Season 3 episode entitled “Love Among the Ruins” opens with Ann Margret belting “Bye Bye Birdie” in the 1963 film adaptation of the eponymous musical. An arc involving the song continues over multiple episodes.

Why We Should Have Seen Betty Draper's Mad Men Fate From a Mile Away

Don Draper’s nickname for Betty Draper is “birdie.” The Ann Margret musical number and the TV commercial the ad men made in an attempt to replicate it are both creepy and surreal, reminiscent of Betty’s drug-induced hallucination during childbirth in an earlier season episode called “The Fog.” And on that note:

The Color Blue

During one of Don’s trysts with Sally’s dippy teacher in Season 3 (in an episode entitled “The Color Blue”), the two homewreckers discuss whether people see the color blue differently. Don replies that people don’t want to admit that others see things differently, a conversation that sounds kind of like an analog of just about every conversation I’ve participated in or overheard about Betty Draper, the character. Is she a terrible petulant child? Or a clever woman stunted by the death of her parents, disappointment in men, and the decorative role society has forced on her? Is she a horrible, fit-throwing bad mom, or is she the embodiment of the fate many college-educated women had during her era?

Betty wears the color blue with fair regularity. She suffers a near constant-battle with ennui brought on by the expectations that she be a perfect stay at home wife, even referring to her angst as “feeling blue.” In Betty’s final note to Sally, she requests that she be buried in her blue dress in the gold garment bag, and that the funeral director should make her look like how she looked on a specific night when she wore the blue dress. Betty wore blue on the day she broke a rib and discovered her illness.

Why We Should Have Seen Betty Draper's Mad Men Fate From a Mile Away

Deliberate choice, or the insane ramblings of an obsessive type with something stuck in her craw? You decide.

For more “Betty=blue,” check out the very very blue background on the shot from “Bye Bye Birdie” featured in the Season 3 arc. They could have chosen different shots from the film. Why did they choose this specific one?

Obvious “Betty Death” Quotes

In Season 3: Betty tells Henry that she wants Don dead. Henry replies that he’s pretty sure Don feels the same way about Betty.

In Season 7, Sally, smoking a cigarette, tells a friend she wishes her mother would die. She’d stay in school until 1975, she adds, if she could “get Betty in the ground.”

Later in Season 7, in what may be Don’s last encounter with Betty, he learns that she’s going to return to college. “Knock ‘em dead, Birdie,” he says, and leaves.

And it’s hard to forget this pair of shots, from the early stages of Betty and Henry’s clandestine romance. In this episode, Betty has purchased an expensive fainting couch because Henry said that a woman like her needed one. She places it in front of the fire place, where things are burned, where smoke emerges. Does this juxtaposition of lushly quilted repose remind you of anything?

Why We Should Have Seen Betty Draper's Mad Men Fate From a Mile Away

Why We Should Have Seen Betty Draper's Mad Men Fate From a Mile Away

Other Birdies That Lived Sadly

In addition to the kinda obvious Bye Bye, Birdie reference, Mad Men features other birds meeting sad or tragic fates. Roger Sterling gifts Joan with a caged bird before one of their trysts in Season 1. Joan covers the cage with a cloth. After Joan boards a taxi with the birdcage, we never see the bird again. Let’s assume it’s dead. It died of the 1960s.

There was also this unforgettable Betty scene in the first season, when Birdie literally shoots birdies, just as eventually Birdie’s cancer will be brought on by Birdie’s habits. We should have seen this coming. But we didn’t.

Why We Should Have Seen Betty Draper's Mad Men Fate From a Mile Away

Knock ‘em dead, Birdie.

Images via Screengrab/AMC


Contact the author at erin@jezebel.com.

What Did We Do To Deserve This Living Hell?: Pitch Perfect 2

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If you want an example of the profound unfunniness of Pitch Perfect 2, look no further than the clip above in which a host of acapella groups competes in a sing-off of “’90s Hip Hop Jamz.” It includes a German team, Das Sound Machine, showing off their zany accents that make them sing things like, “Zis iz how wee do eet,” and, “Zat girl is poizuuun.” Not featured above is their rendition of Kris Kross’s “Jump,” which features altered lyrics, “Kommissar will make you! / Deutschland will make you!” Are you ROTFL yet? Elsewhere in the film, Snoop Dogg sings a straightforward version of “Winter Wonderland.” I was mortified for him.

It’s rare to witness a product that manages to be equal parts earnest and soulless. Equally rare is it to see a movie that passes the Bechdel test with flying colors and yet remains so heinously backward, with dozens of jokes that merely remind you that Rebel Wilson is fat and a self-consciously diverse cast whose non-whites don’t get plots of their own but instead only exist to punctuate scenes with non sequiturs (in the case of the Asian and Latina members of the protagonist acapella team the Barden Bellas) or lust after their peers (in the case of a black lesbian). The closest said queer, Cynthia-Rose Adams (played by singer-songwriter Ester Dean), comes to having her own storyline happens when her hair catches on fire.

A thread of self-commentary runs through Pitch Perfect 2—like when a news anchor reports on a scandal caused by a wardrobe malfunction during a Bellas performance attended by President Obama and voices surprise that an acapella group that has won so many championships “is a thing.” It’s a sub-sub-Pixar (sub-Dreamworks, then), aren’t-we-adorable-and-hilarious-and-wow-so-grounded sense of humor that manages to be self-congratulatory. Virtually every joke landed with a thud in the screening that I attended earlier this week. Imagine that interspersed with awful karaoke that manages to iron the eccentricity out of every song covered or just plain suck. Rebel Wilson, who has a terrible voice, doing the entirety of Pat Benatar’s “We Belong” just made me wonder why anyone would ever want to hear anyone but Pat Benatar sing that song.

Ultimately, Pitch Perfect 2 is another dumb comedy aimed at the youth of its time. Every generation has them—I think about what it would be like to sit through Sister Act and its cloying sining-nun numbers for the first time at this age and I immediately want to curl up in a ball while cradling my nostalgia. From what I can tell, Pitch Perfect 2’s greatest contribution to society is the suggestion that girls fart too. That’s something you don’t see (or hear) in movies everyday. Otherwise, I hope the tepid reception at my screening is representative of the overall response to this crap. With the announcement of the end of American Idol happening earlier this week, it’s the perfect time for us to stick a fork in jukebox pop culture once and for all.

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