As CNN’s John Berman and Don Lemon reported live earlier today in Charleston on last night’s shooting, a woman interrupted the broadcast to set a few things straight. “We’re mad! We’re angry! Tell the truth!” she said as Berman launched into a report about the heartbreak in Charleston, standing feet way from the Emanuel AME Church.

“White people are terrorists! This is not a hate crime!” she continued off-camera.

After Berman introduced Lemon, she yelled, “Don, are you angry?” Coming into frame, she repeatedly shouted questions at Lemon regarding his own anger and then said, “Uncle Tom? Hello?”

“We’re angry. Speak about the anger. Talk about the anger,” she continued as the anchors tried in vain to control the broadcast with their banter.

“The president is a puppet! Stop the lies. Stop the lies. He’s an Uncle Tom, too. President Obama’s an Uncle Tom, too,” she said as Berman announced they were going to break.

“Black folks, get off your knees,” the woman concluded. “And stop praying.”

She wanted to cut the shit and share the anger. And so she did.

While the U.S. and South Carolina state flags that fly above the South Carolina state house were lowered to half-mast today in mourning for the nine victims of last night’s shooting at a historic black church in Charleston, the Confederate flag on display outside the building is still flying high and proud. Why? Because the bizarre display of racist symbolism is so closely protected that it would be impossible to move it without a legislative vote.

According to Raycom Media reporter Will Whitson, the continued display is something of a technical issue: it’s affixed to the top of the flagpole, not on a pulley, meaning that it would be difficult if not impossible to lower it halfway without taking it down altogether—a proposition that presents its own set of problems. State law demands that the government “ensure that the flags authorized above shall be placed at all times as directed in this section and shall replace the flags at appropriate intervals as may be necessary due to wear,” writes Schuyler Kropf at the Post and Courier. In other words, the flag can’t be pulled down until it’s voted on.

It also requires a legislative vote to remove it, so it is not an instantaneous process.

June 18, 2015

The state of South Carolina so reveres the memory of its armed defense of American slavery that lowering the Confederate Battle Flag that flies at full staff outside of its state house would require an official act of government—even after a racist murderer killed a state lawmaker and eight other residents in cold blood.

Image via eyeliam/Flickr. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Once Game of Thrones came to an agreement with a Croatian church to lock down the filming location for Cersei Lannister’s naked walk of shame, and secured a body double for Lena Headey, there was only one thing missing from one of the most important scenes of the season 5 finale: a guy to flash his dick and shout “I’m a Lannister, suck me off!”

On Sept. 30, a casting agency sent out an urgent call for any Caucasian males between the ages of 25 and 50 willing to unsheath their Valyrian steel and hurl obscenities at the disgraced dowager queen.

The right man had to be willing to fly from London to Croatia the next morning, and had to be “happy and confident with full frontal nudity in a crowded scene.” Don’t: Have abnormal-looking junk or piercings. Do: Have pubic hair.

They also promised the actor would be standing with another flasher, in case he wasn’t comfortable doing it alone. But, as you can see above, that turned out not to be necessary. They ended up with a plucky, well-endowed actor named Munro Graham, who brought everything you could hope for to the crucial role of “King’s Landing Nudist.”

Here’s the entire email, which lists the pay for flashing duty as “£990.98 plus travel, fittings and holiday pay.” It was posted on Reddit by someone who didn’t get the part.

“A little moment in a major scene,” indeed.

[h/t Uproxx]

Remember the ‘90s? When you were an innocent incorruptible babe, hermetically sealed from the ills of the world around you, and your mom dragged you to that outdoor John Cougar Mellencamp concert because she couldn’t find a babysitter? And she got a little drunker than she meant to and tried to get you to climb on the picnic table and dance with her like This song has a great beat! but you didn’t want to like Ugh, come ON mom? Now you’re the mom. Congratulations, mom.

Billboard reports that on September 12, the fully immersive youth-oriented branding and entertainment experience known as Williamsburg, Brooklyn, will host the inaugural 90sFest—a nine-hour concert featuring performances by “Coolio, Lisa Loeb, Naughty By Nature, Smash Mouth, Tonic, the surviving members of Blind Melon and New York cover band Saved by the 90s with the Bayside Tigers.”

And guess who’s hosting—Pauly Shore? [Extremely annoying buzzer sound] WRONG!

While you think about it, remember this?

Wazzzaaaaaaaaaaaaaap?

(Budweiser, 1999)

Nice.

OK, do you have your guess ready?

Siiiiiiiiike. Pauly Shore is hosting!

When our parents were children, they played in the driveway, pretending they were Dr. J or Walt Frazier, dreaming of basketball stardom but secretly resigning themselves to the notion that professional athletics wouldn’t be a viable career option for them. We grew up screenshotting secondhand memes from one social media platform and publishing them to another, wondering Is this a viable career option for anyone at all?

It turns out that yes! Famous Instagram aggregator @fuckjerry will make an appearance at 90sFest, for which he will presumably be paid some amount of money:

Other planned activities include giveaways from Seinfeld-inspired Instagram personality F*ckJerry, a 90s-themed bedroom hosted by social media star Betches, a Nintendo Mario Kart tournament and an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the largest “Macarena” dance ever. Teases producer Marc Weinstein of Leuven Media, “now that Pepsi has teased Crystal Pepsi may be coming back , we may be able to offer Crystal Pepsi-based cocktails to our guests in VIP as well.”

Someday, in the not too distant future, every person you’ve ever loved will be dead and every brand with which you’ve ever identified will be forgotten, or maybe your friends will die but the brands will live on. Come in your best ’90s attire. Tickets available now.

Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Witnesses say alleged Charleston shooter Dylann Roof spent as much as an hour inside the Emanuel AME Church before opening fire Wednesday night. Now, CNN reports, there’s video from inside the church, showing someone who looks like Roof sitting with the group moments before the massacre began.

The video was apparently taken by one of the victims, 26-year-old Tywanza Sanders, and posted to the Snapchat app with the caption, “Bible study knowledge planter.”

The person believed to be Roof can be seen sitting on the extreme right of the photo, wearing a gray sweatshirt. According to CNN, a friend of Sanders spotted the video and sent a screenshot to the network.

Mashable also obtained video of the upload in question:

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

A Canadian teen accused of menacing his online gaming adversaries with fake 911 calls is facing 34 criminal charges—and now evidence of his reign of Skype terror is public.

CBC News reports that the 17-year-old’s trial is underway, and one of his purported fake emergency calls, detailing an imaginary hostage situation at someone else’s home, has been released to the media. In the call, the teen says he’s in possession of three hostages, an AR-15 rifle, and a quantity of C4: “You’re going to give me my money, or I’m going to blow everything up,” he tells a 911 dispatcher.

This is just one of a long series of swatting calls in the U.S. and Canada made before the teen’s arrest last year—others included a threatened nerve gas attack on a school, claims of murder, bombings, and other fabricated acts of violence that brought law enforcement to an unsuspecting stranger’s door.

Photo of suspect via Polk County, FL Sheriff’s Department

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

How old is Lorde? Perhaps no question in recent history has so perplexed mankind. Lorde says she was born in November of 1996 (CE)—a claim that appears to be supported by her quote unquote “birth certificate.” In a recent interview with Lena Dunham, however, the New Zealand-born singer might have accidentally let the truth slip out once and for all.

Here is Lorde speaking about her mother:

Lorde: Oh yeah. My mum is such a big influence on all aspects of my life – as a child of immigrants who escaped the First World War, she’s the strongest person I have come across in my entire life.

Let’s reflect on some facts about this statement:

• The last living veteran of WWI died in 2010 at the age of 110
• Lorde’s maternal grandparents, according to the singer, escaped (from Dalmatia) during World War I
  
• Lorde’s mother was born in 1965, having celebrated her 50th birthday this past March

If Lorde’s grandmother escaped World War I at its earliest point, in 1914, at the age of zero, that means she would have given birth to Lorde’s mother, in 1965, at the age of... 51. Impossible? Certainly not. Unlikely? Well, who’s to say, exactly.

What does this all mean? Did Lorde’s grandparents truly flee their home country during World War I? Was Lorde’s grandmother 51 when she gave birth to her mother? Does Lorde remember things about WWI she has yet to reveal to us?

Where did the generations go? Did Lorde really mean World War II? Will Lorde’s next interview be an AARP cover story?

How much did a chocolate bar cost when Lorde first turned 30? A nickel? A buffalo nickel?

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

Thursday evening, Charleston shooting suspect Dylann Roof boarded a plane bound for South Carolina, where he is expected to face multiple murder charges for last night’s brutal slaying of nine people at Emanuel AME Church.

After his arrest earlier today in Shelby, N.C., Roof was taken to an area courthouse where he waived his right to extradition during a brief hearing.

According to WCSC-TV reporter Harve Jacobs, Roof will be charged with nine counts of murder at a bond hearing scheduled for 2 p.m. on Friday.

[Image via NBC Nightly News]

Today, Former Rikers Island captain Terrence Pendergrass was sentenced to five years in prison for denying medical attention to an inmate who died after swallowing a toxic detergent packet. When coworkers expressed concern about the inmate, Pendergrass reportedly replied, “Don’t bother me unless someone is dead.”

[h/t Gothamist]

On Thursday night, newly published interviews with those who knew alleged Charleston shooter Dylann Roof provided disturbing details about the man accused of killing nine people in a racially motivated attack yesterday.

In an interview with ABC News, roommate Dalton Tyler told the network that Roof had been “planning something like that for six months.”

“He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Tyler told ABC. “He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”

Tyler also confirmed earlier reports that Roof’s parents bought him a gun for his birthday, but said that his roommate was only allowed to take the gun from their house this past week.

In a separate interview, childhood friend Joseph Meek Jr. said that Roof erupted into a racist rant during a recent outing. From the Associated Press:

The two reconnected a few weeks ago after Roof reached out to Meek on Facebook, Meek said.

Roof never talked about race years ago when they were friends, but recently made remarks out of the blue about the killing of unarmed black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida and the riots in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, Meek said.

“He said blacks were taking over the world. Someone needed to do something about it for the white race,” Meek told the AP. “He said he wanted segregation between whites and blacks. I said, ‘That’s not the way it should be.’ But he kept talking about it.”

[Image via AP Images]

Theoretically, an incorrect hyperlink could point to any random place on the internet, from Sonic fan art forums to Fusion.com. In practice, however, they only link to porn, porn and slightly weirder porn, as was recently the case with an unusually saucy bottle of Heinz hot ketchup.

Thanks to the unnamed cosmic law of accidental porn links, Daniel Korell of Germany found himself on camgirl site Fundorado after scanning the promotional QR code on a Heinz bottle. From The Local:

Heinz’s ownership of the website for the contest, which ran between 2012 and 2014, had since expired. The bottle was a leftover which had only been filled with ketchup and sold after the contest was over.

Porn site Fundorado had jumped into the gap and registered Heinz’s former address for itself, meaning that Heinz’s defunct shortcut now pointed to a page full of graphic thumbnail images linking to porn videos.

After Korell alerted Heinz to their mistake via social media, the ketchup maker issued a hasty apology, writing, “we really regret the event very much.”

Fundorado, on the other hand, has turned the error into a promotional tool of their own, proudly running a banner on their site reading, “JA, DAS ORIGINAL VON DER KETCHUP FLASCHE!”

[Image via Facebook]

Did you think the torrid relationship between Joyce “Tillie” Mitchell and Richard “Big Dick” Matt was just about sex? Mais non, ma petite cherie. You fail to see the big picture—the picture Matt painted for Tillie. The picture that she in turn apparently presented to her oblivious husband.

According to reports, Matt painted a portrait of Tillie’s children and presented her with the work as a gift. In return, she bought him some gloves. (She is accused of subsequently furnishing the Matt and his accomplice David Sweat with hacksaw blades, chisels, drill bits, a punch, etc.)

L’amour—she is not dead.

Via CNN:

Using a photograph, Matt painted a picture of prison tailor shop instructor Joyce Mitchell’s children, Clinton County District Attorney Andrew Wylie told CNN.

And in April, Wylie said, Mitchell gave the painting to her husband as a wedding anniversary present. In exchange, Mitchell gave Matt a pair of speed bag gloves, similar to boxing gloves.

Now Tillie is behind bars and Matt and his magic sex stick are somewhere in the wind—which I believe is also the basic plot of The Gift of the Magi.

Ah what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to bone convicted murderers in prison.

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

Texas agriculture commissioner Sid Miller has lifted a state ban on deep fryers and soda machines in schools, saying “We want families, teachers and school districts to know the Texas Department of Agriculture supports their decisions and efforts to teach Texas students about making healthy choices.” Hick.

News broke on Wednesday that Charlize Theron, an actor known primarily for her SoulCycle feud with Tia Mowry, has ended her engagement with a man named Sean Penn. We reached out to Tia Mowry’s representatives for comment.

As you know, Mowry and Theron’s contentious relationship began in the summer of 2014 after Charlize rolled her eyes and said “oh my god” to Tia at SoulCycle. Soon after, Charlize allegedly demanded SoulCycle ban Tia from their studios forever. Later, Theron was allegedly rude to some other people at SoulCycle (non-famous). Incredible.

Because their feud has no doubt bound them together for life, keeping their names permanently intertwined in both their public and private lives, we thought Mowry might have some thoughts regarding the end of Theron’s engagement.

With contact information taken from theofficialtiamowry.com—a site to which The Official Tia Mowry has linked in numerous tweets—we reached out to her listed management (Kritzer Levine Wilkins Griffin Entertainment) and publicity (Persona PR) teams.

While we have not yet heard back from Kritzer Levine Wilkins Griffin Entertainment, Persona PR did contact us with a comment:

From: Jordyn K. Palos
Date: June 17, 2015
To: Kelly Conaboy

We don’t rep Tia Mowry…

XX

Wow—just incredible.

Image via Getty. Contact the author at kelly.conaboy@gawker.com.

The Charleston shooter’s uncle says he wishes he could “pull the switch himself” on his accused murderer nephew.

Carson Cowles, Dylann Roof’s uncle, has so far been the only family member to comment on his nephew, initially telling reporters that Roof was “quiet” and lacked motivation after he dropped out of high school. Cowles is also behind the revelation that Roof was given the gun he used to kill nine people as a 21st birthday gift.

Now that Roof is in custody and has apparently confessed to the shooting, Cowles tells the LA Times Roof’s mom is “devastated” but that he personally hopes the kid fries.

“He’s guilty as hell,” Carson Cowles, uncle of Dylann Roof, told the Los Angeles Times in a telephone interview.

His nephew is going to “ride the lightning,” Cowles told The Times, referring to the death penalty. “He’s going to pay for what he’s done. I’d pull the switch myself, if they’d let me.”

Roof’s mother is devastated, Cowles said, but he refused to comment further, saying it was a personal matter.

Cowles said the family was repelled by what his nephew is accused of doing. “He’ll get no sympathy from us, any of us.”

Roof is currently charged with nine counts of murder and a weapons possession charge—which makes him eligible to ride the lightning, should a jury so vote.

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

On Thursday, the Supreme Court rejected a First Amendment challenge to the most thrilling of government speech restrictions: specialty license plates.

In Walker v. Sons of Confederate Veterans, No. 14-144, the Court ruled that Texas was free to refuse the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ application to consecrate a license plate bearing the Confederate battle flag. The case throws into question a cottage industry of specialty license plates around the country. Are plates like Ducks Unlimited and Fight Terrorism—available in dozens of states around the nation—to be consigned to the dustbins of history, based on the whims of bureaucrats at state motor vehicle authorities?

Well, perhaps. Texas law provides several avenues through which an organization can create a new specialty plate. The provision at issue here permits nonprofit organizations to propose specialty plates; if the plate is approved, a portion of the proceeds benefits the nonprofit that proposed it. The director of the board of the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles “may refuse to issue a specialty license plate... that the director or designee considers potentially objectionable to one or more members of the public.” The director has evidently not seen fit to reject plates bearing the insignia of Dr. Pepper, Don’t Tread on Me, or God Bless Texas (funds from which benefit the Texas Education Agency).

Specialty plates are tiny, customized patches of political controversy. Texas, like many other states, has the option to purchase a Choose Life plate, proceeds from which are deposited into a special account designated “only to provide for the material needs of pregnant women who are considering placing their children for adoption.” Choose Life—an organization dedicated to encouraging adoption through, of all avenues, license plate messaging—has also litigated license plate cases across the country.

These cases come down to one core question: who is the speaker? The First Amendment looks askance on discrimination against private speech based on viewpoint, but it also doesn’t compel government to adopt a particular message. When an individual or organization submits an application for an original plate, the individual chooses the message: courts in the Fourth, Eighth, and Ninth Circuits have held that application to be private speech, albeit in a forum available to the public. In 2001, the Sons of Confederate Veterans challenged a Virginia statute that authorized the Virginia DMV to produce a specialty license plate but prohibited the plate from “bearing a logo or emblem of any kind.” The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia held that the plates were private speech, not government speech, and that the law was “inexorably crafted to discriminate against Plaintiffs based on the content of their message.” The Fourth Circuit affirmed the ruling.

But in Tennessee, as in Texas, the “Choose Life” plate is available, not because Choose Life submitted an application, but because state law mandates that it be made available: the government chooses the message. This fact makes the “Choose Life” plates look an awful lot like government speech, as the Sixth Circuit has held—and “[a]lthough this exercise of government one-sidedness with respect to a very contentious political issue may be ill-advised,” the First Amendment does not require government to speak equally on all sides of controversial topics.

In a rare display of good sense, Texas rejected Sons of Confederate Veterans’ application to create a license plate bearing a symbol of white supremacy. Sons of Confederate Veterans sued, arguing that Texas’s failure to approve its application violated the organization’s freedom of speech under the First Amendment, and asked the district court to force Texas to grant its application. The district court declined to compel the DMV to issue the plates, but the Fifth Circuit reversed, holding that specialty license plates are private speech, not government speech, and that the government may not discriminate among proposed license plates based on viewpoint. Texas appealed.

The First Amendment doesn’t allow the state to prevent the Sons of Confederate Veterans—”the oldest hereditary organization for male descendants of Confederate soldiers,” if you don’t count Southern white society as a hereditary organization—from flying Confederate flags on their lawns or from plastering their trucks with stickers bearing the likeness of the Ku Klux Klan’s first Grand Wizard, available in the organization’s web store for a mere $4. The First Amendment also doesn’t place any restrictions a state’s offensive and misguided decision to fly the Confederate flag high even when all others are at half-staff. But because of the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday, Texas is now pretty much free to pick and choose the organizations from which it will gratefully accept $8,000 for the privilege of creating a specialty plate.

Yesterday’s decision makes clear that Texas can say whatever it damn pleases on its own license plates—though it can’t compel drivers to convey its “ideological message.” Justice Breyer, writing for a slim majority, was optimistic that “the Free Speech Clause helps produce informed opinions among members of the public, who are then able to influence the choices of a government that, through words and deeds, will reflect its electoral mandate.” Of course, you don’t have to be a complete cynic to doubt whether the electorate of Texas will influence the words and deeds of the Texas DMV to reflect inclusivity and good taste in all endeavors.

And as Justice Alito pointed out in dissent, Texas’s (unquestionably correct) reason for rejecting the specialty plate—because “many members of the general public find the design offensive, and because such comments are reasonable”—also shows that the state is willing to turn away topics it deems controversial.

The only question is which statements the DMV will shun: the court record reflected that the DMV had previously turned away only one plate under current regulations, a “Texas DPS Troopers’ Foundation” license plate. And though the classic solution to free speech problems is more speech, the government isn’t obligated to provide room to detractors who disagree with its own license plate messaging. As a group of states that filed a brief on Texas’s behalf wrote, “States should not have to issue plates favoring different priorities.”

So while Texas doesn’t have to create Confederate flag plates, it’s also free to ignore efforts to promote pro-choice, pro-immigration, or pro-Affordable Care Act plates—all of which are conspicuously absent from the state’s offerings. Likewise, South Carolina is free to keep its Sons of Confederate Veterans plates—though today it seems especially ill-advised to do so.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba is an attorney and writer working on free expression, tech, and privacy issues in the public interest.

Photo of Confederate license plate via AP.

Daniel Pantaleo, the cop who placed Eric Garner in the chokehold that killed him last year, has a round-the-clock security detail stationed outside his Staten Island home, he divulged in court papers this week. And his protectors aren’t just any rent-a-cops—they’re badge-and-gun carrying NYPD officers, paid for by the citizens of New York City.

The revelation came after the nonprofit Legal Aid Society requested that the number of Civilian Complaint Review Board complaints against Pantaleo—the formal mechanism by which New Yorkers can air their grievances about particular cops—be made public. Pantaleo is arguing that a previous leak of CCRB information led to death threats and harassment against him, and is using the two cops in a patrol car who sit outside his house 24 hours a day to show that the harassment was legit. The NYPD also installed surveillance cameras and a “panic button” at the home.

At least one person really has threatened to kill Pantaleo. In February, a Michigan man was arrested for writing, “I’m going to personally kill and behead Daniel Pantaleo. This is a written threat and has to be taken seriously” on Facebook. But it’s deeply disingenuous to connect that or any other instance of harassment to Pantaleo’s CCRB reports. If he is being harassed, something tells me it has much more to do with the fact that he killed an unarmed man on camera and got away with it than it does with past civilian complaints. Just a hunch.

h/t Gothamist. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Family members of the victims killed during Wednesday’s shooting at Emanual AME church in Charleston confronted accused gunman Dylann Roof during his bond hearing this afternoon. “We have no room for hate,” one relative said. “So we have to forgive. I pray God has mercy on your soul.”

Representatives of the family members had the chance to speak to Roof via a remote link. Not everyone spoke, but those who did mentioned forgiveness. “I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you,” a daughter of Ethel Lance said as the suspected killer as he stood there in silence. “And have mercy on your soul. You hurt me. You hurt a lot of people but God forgives you, and I forgive you.”

From CNN:

Felicia Sanders — the mother of victim Tywanza Sanders — said that “every fiber in my body hurts, and I will never be the same.”

“As we said in the Bible study, we enjoyed you,” she said of Roof. “But may God have mercy on you.”

The granddaughter of another victim told Roof, “Hate won’t win.”

Later in the hearing, a judge denied Roof’s bail request on the murder charges and set bail at $1 million for the weapons charge. His first court date is set for October 23.

The full bond hearing is below.

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Yep, it’s creepy.

Summer Lesson, a VR experiment for Sony’s Project Morpheus headset produced by Namco Bandai, is a powerful virtual reality experience. It’s also disturbing and awkward and, well, kind of pornographic.

No, she doesn’t get naked. It’s not that kind of lesson — at least, not literally. And yet it’s clearly a strong hint about how sex will sell in virtual reality, even in places where actual VR porn might be off the menu. The VR industry hasn’t been willing to talk about porn, because they don’t want that to be the focus of the conversation, but Summer Lesson is a concession that, yes, VR will be a platform for those kinds of experiences.

It’s a pretty simple demo, really. You’re sitting on the porch of a traditional Japanese house on a beautiful beach. You’re minding your own business, enjoying the summer breeze. Sea, sky, sunflowers and a nice gentle wind—nature in perfect harmony. A ripe watermelon sits on a table. Looks tasty. You can’t stand up or walk around, but you can look (and lean) around to see inside the beautifully detailed house.

Then she comes along—a beautiful blond Caucasian girl with short shorts, a form-fitting semi-transparent top, and a ridiculous figure to go with them. She asks me if I can be her sensei, teach her a little Japanese. How could I say no? Of course, even if I wanted to say no, I couldn’t. If I refuse her, she just laughs and continues.

I look her up and down. Yep, she’s hot. And then things go to the creepy place.

The innocent, carefree way she talks to me, my inability to get up off the porch, and the facts that I grow sunflowers and own traditional Japanese beachfront property bring me to a realization. I am probably old. I am an old perverted man looking this girl up and down. I’ve actually stumbled into a very specific fantasy. I try to put it out of my mind.

As the demo goes on, it encourages my bad behavior. She has me lean in close to check her Japanese homework. Oh look, she’s so happy she just discovered a word that means “love”! She loses her guitar pick, and puts herself in a couple of vaguely compromising positions while she searches for it.

Suddenly, she asks me to hold very still, and gets really close to me. Is she going to kiss me? My perverted old man-heart skips a beat.

Nope, she was just trying to catch a butterfly that had landed on my shoulder. But how about that nice red bra, eh? Awkward.

At the end of the demo, a weird man stumbles onto the property, announces that he’s the film director, and congratulates you on your acting. Great job! You don’t need to feel bad if you looked at her lustily, reads the game’s subtext, because she was an adult actress, not an innocent girl.

Which was kind of nice of them, because the game’s director—also a man—was watching me the whole time, and I’m not sure how to explain my behavior. I wind up smiling and telling him how impressive it was that she got so close. He smiles and nods.

This isn’t the first version of Summer Lesson, by the way. The first, featuring a Japanese schoolgirl, was even more overtly sexual. Japanese players responded to that version by saying things like “I wouldn’t want anyone watching me while I played,” and “I think I’m in love.” The subtext is hardly subtext at all.

This is one of the VR demos that Sony is using to sell Project Morpheus to early adopters whom they hope will lead the consumer market. The hook seems to be that you can leer at schoolgirls, and the “lesson” is that you won’t get in trouble for it.

Contact the author at sean.hollister@gizmodo.com.