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11 Things You Probably Never Knew About the Making of Back to the Future

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Tomorrow’s the day Marty McFly arrives from 1985, and we’re all gearing up to celebrate the anniversary of the best time travel movie ever made. But how much do you know about this time-travel classic? Here are 11 strange facts about the making of Back to the Future.

The facts in this video previously appeared in a post here at io9, and were gleaned from the amazing book We Don’t Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy by Caseen Gaines, which is chock full of fascinating details. Read an excerpt from the book, about a hoverboard stunt that nearly cost a stuntwoman her life, here.

http://www.amazon.com/We-Dont-Need-R...


The Pain and Beauty of Field Niggas: An Interview With Filmmaker Khalik Allah

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The Pain and Beauty of Field Niggas: An Interview With Filmmaker Khalik Allah

“This nowhere,” begins Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts in her 2011 chronicle Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, “between dream and reality, between what one sees and what one imagines, between what is happening and your attempt to describe it, is the territory we wander while awake.”

This revelation arrives during an attempt by the author to record her dreams (“the idea was to have a catalog of the realms I sometimes visit at night, often repeatedly”) and it is this Harlem, this particular space between dream and reality, that Field Niggas, the debut documentary by Khalik Allah, occupies so masterfully.

Part street noir, part anthropological nocturne, Field Niggas is an hour-long survey of one of Harlem’s most legendary crossings: 125th Street and Lexington Avenue. Allah has lived and breathed these streets for some time—he joined the Five Percent Nation as a teen and traveled to Harlem often, where the organization is headquartered—and was familiar with the intersection and the people which sit at the center of his film. In it, the 30-year-old New Yorker turns his camera on a group of men and women, most of them destitute drug addicts but not all, that stalk its sidewalks under the blanket of a summer night. The images—radiant in their rawness and desperation—and audio are not in sync, and the effect gives the film a sort of trancelike feeling. A trip, both literally and figuratively.

125th and Lex, as it is commonly referred to by longtime residents, is infamous for being a crime-riddled hub of vice where one can score all manner of illicit drugs. And it is out of this dark elixir that Allah paints a new, more humane portrait: a people in search of mercy, just looking to survive.


Gawker: Let’s jump right in. Why title this documentary Field Niggas?

Khalik Allah: Coming into the art world and the film world—I’m a photographer—I never thought that I would it would be accepted anyway. Even with this film, releasing it the way I did at first through YouTube, I was like, ‘I’m going to put out what I want to put out.’ In the past, I applied to photo competitions and film competitions and never got accepted or on any short lists, so when I chose the title, it was me saying: I don’t give a fuck about distribution, I don’t give a fuck about being accepted. The title came from the heart. More than anything, the term “field niggas” was coined by Malcolm X in a speech called “Message to the Grassroots”—it represents the rebellious slaves, the slaves who were leading insurrections and killing their masters and running away. Growing up, and learning about those types of slaves, I was always intrigued by them. I feel like the people I’m documenting in Harlem today are the modern-day field slaves. And using that word, field niggas, it makes people both attract and repel to this film. Some people want to see the film based off the title; to see if the content of the film can justify having such a title.

But for me, it’s a term of endearment. I consider myself a field nigga. Looking at people like Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and Toussaint Louverture, even Frederick Douglass—these were slaves who decided enough was enough, who ran away and led rebellions. I came into the game thinking I was going to be blacklisted from the get go with a name like Field Niggas. So I just came in like a rebel and put it out.

At one point early in the film, a black woman says, “125th is a prison, it’s a prison without the gates.” These are stories of hope, despair, and perseverance, and of the consequence of drug addiction. Tell me more about the people you met while filming.

We never have enough information to judge anything appropriately. Instead of trying to judge things, just accept. Acceptance comes from vision. The vision being: Ok, I don’t have enough information to judge, let me just try to see; instead of trying to analyze, let me accept. And that’s my approach with the people. Instead of analyzing them and breaking them down, I just accept them as a unified whole. In doing so, people open up to me differently. And the people I met, especially the woman you’re referring to, had extremely profound answers on the questions I spit out to them. That particular woman, I asked: ‘What do you believe happens when you die?’ The question came because— looking at her she looked so near to death—I wanted to know what her idea was of dying. She was malnourished in the street and addicted to drugs. When I saw her, the question came spontaneously. A lot of my questions happen that way. But it all starts with seeing someone on a plain, basic physical level; then we begin talking. Although they may be addicted to drugs, they’re still coherent. This is the case with many of the people in my film, and many of the people I meet in the streets: we can’t paint them all with one brush. They’re not monolithic. The homeless, the poor—they’re not a monolithic group of people; they’re all different. Just approaching them with the highest expectations—that they might have something of value to offer—reminds them that they are not their behavior; they’re not what their behavior dictates. I’m always trying to see the best in the people that I’m working with. In one respect, it lets them know where I’m coming from—that the work I’m doing is genuine—and also safeguards me from any animosity.

This particular intersection in Harlem is a notorious hub for drugs and for the homeless. What initially drew you to document it and the people who inhabit its sidewalks and storefronts?

When I was younger, I got retained in school. That was 8th grade, in 1998. And I used to drive around with my brother. One day I was in the backseat of his Honda thinking, ‘Whatever I do, I gotta get knowledge. I gotta get some sort of knowledge.’ I had joined the Five Percent Nation, and the Allah School is on 7th Avenue—I’m from Long Island originally—so I would come into Harlem, 125th and Lex and avoid it because I was only coming for the esoteric books that you could buy for 50 cents back then. I would see this corner and think, ‘Damn, these people are zombies. I’m gonna stay away from that.’ It’s ironic, so many years later, when I became an artist and a photographer, that this becomes the common denominator, the central meeting point for my photography and filmmaking work.

In 2010, when I became a photographer, I started shooting in the Lower East Side—for about two years—and what I was trying to do was emulate the greatest black and white photographers: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, William Klein. And I noticed that I didn’t have my own signature, my own style. From there I tried to develop my own style. I started to shoot in Harlem and stayed out at night—and I saw results. I guess I was attracted to the area because in the LES you could walk around for hours and not find anything that too interesting to photograph. Whereas, when I got on this corner at nighttime I didn’t see any other photographers—I guess they were scared to come out—and the only other camera was the surveillance camera. I could focus on this one corner; it’s got the 4/5/6 train station so people are always coming and going, which makes for a good amount of subjects. The fact that the subjects are as gutter and visceral as they are, made me say, ‘Yo this is definitely me.’ It was also a good template for me to bounce a lot of my spiritual concepts off of; it helped develop that within me as well.

That corner means so much to me. I feel like I’m an adopted son of Harlem.

The Pain and Beauty of Field Niggas: An Interview With Filmmaker Khalik Allah

You mentioned “spiritual concepts”; how does being in the Five Percent Nation factor into the message you’re trying to get across in this film?

The Five Percent Nation is something I went through throughout my entire teenage life—it gave me a foundation. Going through Harlem, first for the knowledge instead of as an artist to take photographs and videos, helped me. The same knowledge that I was coming for by way of the Five Percent Nation—the lessons of 120 Degrees, Supreme Mathematics and Supreme Alphabet—it helped me to know how to present myself, how to be civilized, how to be fearless. That gave me a tremendous amount of discipline. Many people in Harlem, and on 125th and Lex, have knowledge of self and they know about the teachings of the Five Percenters.

Oftentimes, I’ve had to dig deep into those teachings and spit out a lesson to a person on the block just so they know that I know what time it is. Or somebody could be grilling me with the camera—Who are you? What are you doing with this?—and then I can start spitting Mathematics at them, which takes the conversation to a whole new level. It helps to break a lot of the walls and open up communication. Without me having 120 Lessons and going through the rigorous training of the Five Percent Nation, I probably wouldn’t be as durable, mentally, to do what I do. Nowadays you have people learning lessons and knowledge of self through the internet, and it’s not the same. The training I had was analogue, as opposed to the digital era. Not to say that the internet is a bad thing, but I was very hands on. Back then, guys would punch you in the face if you didn’t quote your degree properly. Not that that happened to me, but I’ve seen it happen—it just made me more serious.

I’m interested, too, in the way in which you shot the documentary. It’s visually stunning. You mentioned this earlier, how you melded to mediums—photography and filmmaking, one of which you had a background in and one you picked up later—and you’ve fashioned them into something really powerful. Why tell this story in this specific way, as opposed to traditional filmmaking or via a photo series?

Those are the tools I’d been working with, and going into the film without a budget and without people backing me financially, it gave me tremendous liberty. I said: I can do whatever the hell I want, however I want, make it whatever I want, edit it however I want in whatever timeframe I want. That just gave me tremendous creative control, which let me use my imagination as much as I wanted. The technical things I did were actually very simple; I just used them in a way that hasn’t been used in an entire documentary before.

And the film feels very free in a way that other films don’t.

It feels free because it allows the audience to participate mentally with the project. I’m not telling you what to think throughout the film; the out-of-sync audio and video enables that. With this, you’re seeing something in slow motion that’s like an abstract depiction of what you’re hearing, and what you’re hearing is in real time. That break, between audio and video, let’s you invest your own imagination into the project and participate with it. Then there’s the stylistic element: it almost helps you to forgive the situation because the film is so artistically done and the people are shot in such a dignified way that it makes them look beautiful.

That was actually one of the things I loved most about the film. The artist Kehinde Wiley creates these grand paintings where he’ll take black subjects off 125th in Harlem or off Fulton Street in Brooklyn—black people that typically wouldn’t be in European or what we consider classical art pieces—and position them in, say, a Rembrandt or Jacques-Louis David painting. He’s challenging ideas of ownership, space, and representation, but, in a way, I feel like he is also ascribing to white ideals. Field Niggas subverts that notion and says: We’re beautiful where we are already, we don’t need to be anywhere else.

Coming into this project, that was my idea—to be unapologetic. The first title of the film was Unapologetic Field Niggas, but I didn’t want a title that chunky. Because if the work is unapologetic, you don’t have to say it; just put it out there. But coming into it with that mentality, it was me saying: Fuck these other depictions of beauty. I previously made a film called Antonyms of Beauty. At the time, I felt that all the young photographers were shooting beautiful things—landscapes and women with their breasts out—so I came with Antonyms of Beauty and tried to shoot the street in a way I’d never seen before. And it actually was beautiful. They weren’t just antonyms, because beauty is just really in the eye of the beholder. We don’t have to fit or change into anything to appeal to anybody. And in adopting that mentality, the film ends up blowing up and I end up becoming more well-known in the art and photography world, when my intention was to be like, Fuck the art world and the photography world. It was amazing that when I decided to do it for me, that’s when everybody else attracted to it.

The Pain and Beauty of Field Niggas: An Interview With Filmmaker Khalik Allah

So what are you working on next?

I just came back from two weeks in Jamaica; I’m shooting my new film. When I created Field Niggas, I said I wanted it to be one of three in a trilogy. The second and third film will be similar aesthetically—they’ll have a very stylistic nuance to them—but the concept will be very different. I don’t want to go somewhere else and just recreate Field Niggas. This new film in Jamaica is centered around the Maroon people. The Maroons escaped the slave ships into the mountains, and being that they were from Africa they already knew how to live off of the land. They were able to adapt to Jamaica. Til this day, they still remain in the highest altitudes of the mountains in Jamaica that are considered inhospitable to other people. I went and visited with them. The film is going to be very abstract, it’s going to be very experimental, and I’m shooting in a lot of daylight for this one. I’m trying to innovate.

My main thing: It’s not about the form, it’s about the content. The content is always the leading force, and the form should be built to house the content properly. I’m focused on the content right now. I’m getting conversations with people all across the island, young and old. I did an interview with a young girl, and I asked her: ‘What would you like to see changed for the children of Jamaica?’ And she started to talk about rape culture, and how she hoped to see it done away with. I followed up with another question, and she admitted to having been raped. She went on for ten minutes. It was powerful. It will be interesting to revisit that in the editing process. When I’m shooting I’m just capturing people’s words, trying to make it beautiful.

It’s interesting you mention that young girl’s story. When I watched Field Niggas I was thinking a lot about how most of these stories are stories of trauma, but when you’re listening to them and viewing the footage at the same time, it has this reverse effect where it becomes healing in a way, despite what you’re hearing. There is a recognition in the struggle of these people, many of whom want to do better but for one reason or another are trapped amid the ecstasy of night.

That is the proper way to see it. My form of empathy doesn’t join in another person’s suffering, and thus try to lighten their burden by joining into it. Because that’s how empathy works for most people. One person will try to lighten the suffering by experiencing that burden together. Where, with this film, the form of empathy was: “I had a death in my family” and my response would be like, ‘Well, there really is no death. Everything is eternal; that person served a purpose in your life.’ I tried to have a more optimistic response to people, which led the conversation in different direction and helped to not look down on these people if they are less. The whole point of this film was to say we’re equal; these people are equal—on the level of humanity. We’re not equal financially, or equal with our housing situations, or bank accounts, but we’re equal on the level that we are all children of the Most High. And that makes us equal regardless of the laws of man. Going into the film with my spiritual concepts intact, growing up as a Five Percenter, it made me look at everything differently. I see the impact it’s had on the work I’m doing now.

Field Niggas is screening at Made in NY Media Center by IFP until October 22. The film will also screen as part of the AFI Fest in Los Angeles in November. Additional screenings to follow.

You can view more of Khalik Allah’s work here.

[All images via the artist]

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Asteroid to Strike Earth on Halloween: Scaremongering, or Scary Fact? 

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Asteroid to Strike Earth on Halloween: Scaremongering, or Scary Fact? 

Here is what everyone agrees on: this Halloween, a “massive” asteroid will pass close to earth at “unusually” high speeds. Will it kill us? Well, that is the question.

Certainly, when we are confronted with news of a looming date with an asteroid “the size of a football stadium,” the question that is foremost in the minds of the public, as well as media representatives such as ourselves who exist to serve the public, is: Will this asteroid, which is moving at a speed of more than 78,000 miles per hour, crash directly into Earth, setting off a calamitous global extinction event of the sort that wiped out the dinosaurs long ago? After all, if an asteroid is merely going to pass within 300,000 miles of our planet, as so many of the “experts” hasten to reassure us, then it makes us wonder why we should pay any attention to the asteroid’s fly-by at all. I may not be a credentialed astronomer or famous planetary scientists, but I do have a dose of common sense. So I ask myself: if this asteroid will not get within 300,000 miles of us, why are all these media outlets publishing stories about it? What difference does it make to readers if a big rock flies by so far away that we can’t even see it? Why so much hubbub?

I may not be a NASA “insider,” but I do feel a responsibility to use my media platform to keep readers appraised of important—and potentially life-altering—news developments. And so I am simply raising to you the unavoidable question: is this asteroid, in fact, going to strike earth with terrific concussive force, vaporizing huge swaths of lands instantaneously in a fireball and darkening our world’s skies for months or years with deadly, ashy fallout? Is the end of humanity only days away? Will we face our doom, with ghoulish propriety, on Halloween, the night when we celebrate Satan’s power? It is simply dishonest not to confront this question, based upon the strong circumstantial evidence at hand. I am not here to scare anyone unnecessarily; nor am I here to participate in a vast coverup. I am here only to ask why we are hearing so much about this huge asteroid, if there is no chance that it will kill us all. Why—so we can look at it in a telescope, a vague and grainy dot in the far skies? To me, that seems boring.

I am just one respected journalist. I do not seek to cause alarm. I only want you all to use your own critical faculties to evaluate the “official” story of what’s happening. I’m obligated by professional ethics to report to you that NASA says “There is no asteroid threatening earth.” But let’s dig deeper. In fact, NASA’s statement is about claims “that an asteroid will impact Earth, sometime between Sept. 15 and 28, 2015.” A NASA scientist says, trickily, bolding ours, “There is no scientific basis — not one shred of evidence — that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates.

Will an asteroid impact Earth on Halloween though? I don’t even want to know. Do you? I’d rather just die quickly. I’m not asserting that we will die quickly—or slowly—on that day. But if the possibility can be ruled out, I am not the one capable of scientifically doing the ruling-out. So I simply present the theoretical options to you. The rest, I suppose, is in God’s hands.

Happy Halloween—I hope.

[Not a “real” photograph, technically, but certainly a graphic representation of a theoretical possibility: Shutterstock]

Man Allegedly Pulls Gun on People Who Caught Him Masturbating in a Subway Station

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Man Allegedly Pulls Gun on People Who Caught Him Masturbating in a Subway Station

The NYPD is looking for a man accused of masturbating in a subway station, then pulling a gun when someone tried to catch him on video.

A witness told police she was inside the 5th Ave N/R station late Monday night when she heard a hissing noise behind her. She turned around to find the suspect “manipulating his penis outside his pants,” Gothamist reports.

As the alleged masturbator exited the station, the woman pointed him out to another man, who started taking video on his phone and following the fleeing suspect. At this point, the creep allegedly took out a gun, pointed it at the man, and demanded he stop filming.

Gothamist obtained the witness’s video, which is only 8 seconds long, but clearly shows the guy accused of being a violent jerk (and also not a very nice person). Here it is:

Subway masturbation is a very common and very well-documented occurrence in NYC. I couldn’t turn up any stats on jerking off specifically, but 3,000 misdemeanor sex crimes were reported in the subway system between 2008 and 2013.

http://gawker.com/5882047/heres-...

http://gawker.com/5596875/have-y...

http://gawker.com/horny-man-with...

http://gawker.com/5903719/heres-...

Masturbators are hardly news anymore, but a masturbator pointing a gun at the people who caught him with his dick out in public and telling them to “mind their own business?” That would be a new one.

The suspect could face charges of criminal menacing.

[Gothamist.]

Even Police Chiefs Understand Mass Incarceration Is Bad

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Even Police Chiefs Understand Mass Incarceration Is Bad

Plenty of people agree that America should stop throwing every last shoplifter or weed-smoker in jail. On the right they get to talk about reducing incarceration’s burden on taxpayers; on the left it’s a victory for civil rights. Now, even the country’s top law enforcement officials—those who you’d think would be driving mass incarceration in the first place—are getting in on the act.

This week, a new group called Launch of Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, composed of 130 police chiefs and government prosecutors, announced its support for the criminal justice movement. Its members are no slouches: LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, and Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department Chief Cathy Lanier all belong to the organization, and Chicago PD Superintendent Garry McCarthy is its co-chair.

Tomorrow, Law Enforcement Leaders will convene at the White House to speak about reducing imprisonment while “strengthening public safety” (these are still cops we’re talking about). Among their talking points are a more treatment-focused approach to offenders with drug or mental health problems, reclassifying some felonies as misdemeanors, and ending federal mandatory minimums—all old sawhorses of the activist movement to end mass incarceration.

It’s encouraging, and it’s also a little funny to see these particular people get behind this particular cause—like McDonald’s rallying against hamburgers. In a story about the new group, the New York Times acknowledges that police and prosecutors “have a great deal of discretion” in interpreting and carrying out the very policies they’re railing against, and makes the case that pressure to be tough on crime from the public and elected officials forces them into the current overly punitive model.

“Good crime control policy does not involve arresting and imprisoning masses of people. It involves arresting and imprisoning the right people,” McCarty said in a statement about Law Enforcement Leaders. “Arresting and imprisoning low-level offenders prevents us from focusing resources on violent crime.” It makes you wonder what inspired Bill Bratton to join. Through his tenures leading the NYPD and LAPD, and in his early advocacy for stop-and-frisk and broken windows policing, Bratton is something like the Michael Jordan of arresting and imprisoning low-level offenders. He must have been facing an awful lot of public pressure.


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

Israeli Prime Minister: Okay But The Holocaust Wasn't Totally Hitler's Fault

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Israeli Prime Minister: Okay But The Holocaust Wasn't Totally Hitler's Fault

In an address to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided it might be a good idea to partially absolve Hitler of responsibility for the systematic genocide of six million Jews. In doing so, Netanyahu parroted an idea that has since been widely rejected by the vast majority of historians.

From The Times of Israel (emphasis ours):

Netanyahu posited that the Nazi fuehrer did not initially intend to annihilate the Jews, but rather sought to expel them from Europe. According to the prime minister’s version of the events, Hitler changed his mind after meeting with Husseini — who was grand mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948, and president of the Supreme Muslim Council from 1922 to 1937 — in Berlin near the end of 1941.

Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time [of the meeting between the mufti and the Nazi leader]. He wanted to expel the Jews,” Netanyahu said. “And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to mandatory Palestine],’” continued the prime minister.

“‘So what should I do with them?’ He [Hitler] asked,” according to Netanyahu. “He [Husseini] said, ‘Burn them.’”

But as leading Israeli historian Tom Segev told the Times, even entertaining the idea that Hitler needed to be guided to the decision to exterminate the Jews is “entirely absurd.” And while “one can surely say that [Husseini] was a war criminal... one cannot say Hitler needed his advice.” Hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been killed before the two had ever met in the first place.

Netanyahu described his alternate history of the Holocaust in an effort to prove that Palestinians have a history of using holy locales in Jerusalem as an excuse to commit violent attacks against Jews. In doing so, and according to opposition leader Isaac Herzog, Netanyahu effectively “[trivialized] the Holocaust” and “[played] into the hands of Holocaust deniers.”

More than that, though, Netanyahu is doing this so that he can take the most tragic event in Jewish history and place blame squarely on the shoulders of the Palestinians. That takes an awful lot of hate.


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


Explore the Otter's Mysteries With Zooey Deschanel

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Explore the Otter's Mysteries With Zooey Deschanel

Sea otters contain multitudes. They are both the smallest marine mammal and the largest member of the Mustelidae (weasel) family; they swim on their little tummies, but can also swim on their little backs; they are otters, and they are Zooey Deschanel’s daughter. But why? Well, I’ll tell you.

http://defamer.gawker.com/zooey-deschane...

We learned yesterday that Zooey Deschanel named her three-month-old penny-farthing-shaped earring “Elsie Otter.” El-Sea Otter. Sea Otter. Also yesterday, she appeared on Today (confusing) to explain why she bestowed upon a human the name of a non-human animal:

“I love otters… she’s going to love them. We just really liked the name Elsie, and then we both love otters because they’re so sweet and also smart. They use tools, they keep their favorite tools, they hold hands while they sleep, there are so many amazing things about otters. They’re wonderful animals.”

They use tools, they keep their favorite tools. They hold hands while they sleep. There are so many amazing things about otters.

Indeed.

We can only hope the otters’ accomplishments don’t demolish Elsie under their considerable weight.


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

Drug Kingpin “El Chapo” Reportedly Broke His Leg, Smashed His Face While Fleeing Police

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Drug Kingpin “El Chapo” Reportedly Broke His Leg, Smashed His Face While Fleeing Police

Mexican special forces hunting Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman reportedly chased him off of a small cliff earlier this month, causing the escaped drug kingpin to break his leg and smash his face.

http://gawker.com/watch-security...

Citing a Mexican official with knowledge of the manhunt, CNN reports that special forces found Guzman near the town of Cosala on October 9. El Chapo, who escaped from a maximum security prison in Mexico in July, was reportedly with a young girl at the time; later, when he was alone, the authorities reportedly chased him on foot through the mountainous Sinola town. From CNN:

As they closed in, the official said, Guzman fell off the cliff. His bodyguards rushed to the bottom of the cliff, carried Guzman away and were able to escape in the dense forest, according to the official.

He hasn’t been seen since, though officials told CNN their chances of capturing him now that he is injured “have [been] boosted tremendously.”

Guzman escaped from prison on July 11, fleeing through an elaborate tunnel that was 30-feet below ground and equipped with ventilation, lighting, and a motorcycle track. To test the air of the tunnel, El Chapo reportedly sent a tiny and doomed bird named “Chapito” inside first. Perhaps Chapo’s injuries are karma for Chapito’s fate?

http://gawker.com/el-chapo-sent-...

Image via AP.

Kate Hudson Finally Addresses Hot Nick Jonas Sex Rumor

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Kate Hudson, who allegedly fucked a Jonas Brother, appeared on Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live last night with Zooey Deschanel, who definitely named her baby Otter. That last part is neither here nor there—the Nick Jonas thing is what everybody wanted to talk about (on Watch What Happens Live).

http://defamer.gawker.com/zooey-deschane...

So, is Kate Hudson? Dating Nick Jonas? In the clip above, a caller asks her directly if the rumors are true. Kate responds this way:

“Hahaha...I...I don’t, I don’t like to address any kind of gossip.”

Last week, when asked by a group of reporters at an event for ladies face cream about her alleged relationship with the 23-year-old, she said, “Oh god, yeah, oh yeah...see ya later.”

http://defamer.gawker.com/kate-hudson-on...

So there you have it.

See ya later.


Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

New York City Bans Sales of Sketchy Synthetic Marijuana, Better Known as K2

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NYC mayor Bil De Blasio signed a trio of bills Tuesday that outlaw the sale of synthetic weed, commonly known as K2. It’s basically a plant sprayed with chemicals, then packaged and sold in bodegas as “incense” or “potpourri” that’s “not for human consumption.” The exact mix of synthetic cannabinoids varies from brand to brand, and changes often to get around states’ controlled substance lists.

Previously, stores could be fined $250 for possession of K2 Now, selling the drug comes with heavy fines—up to $50,000—and jail time, and stores caught selling it could lose their licenses to sell tobacco.

De Blasio announced the new laws in East Harlem, which has been hit especially hard by K2. DNAinfo New York reported 120 people were sent to the hospital with in a single week earlier this year after they smoked a brand of synthetic marijuana called Mr. Big Shot, which has since been taken off the shelves.

Still, K2 is ubiquitous and dirt cheap—cheaper than food, as the New York Times pointed out—making it especially risky for the city’s homeless population.

“Since January 2015, there have been more than 4,500 synthetic cannabinoid-related emergency department visits in New York City, with more than 1,200 emergency department visits occurring in July ... Patients have a median age of 37 and are disproportionately residents of shelters and individuals with a psychiatric illness,” according to the city.

“It’s very cheap, you can buy a bag from anywhere between $2 and $5,” a spokesperson for City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who sponsored one of the new anti-K2 bills, told DNAInfo. “It doesn’t come up on drug tests. So if you are on parole, if you have an ACS case, this is the ideal drug because nobody is going to be able to test for it.”

The high is extremely erratic, though. Some K2 mixtures just seem to make people fall asleep, while others—like Mr. Big Shot—have caused seizures, vomiting and hallucinations. Or worse.

In Anchorage, Alaska, where the drug is known as Spice, it’s become more prevalent than cocaine and heroin combined, cops say. A naked woman allegedly high on the drug ripped apart the inside of an Anchorage Subway restaurant last week.

Alaska authorities sent some Spice being sold in that state to a California lab, which found it was made with “a hodgepodge of different chemicals and drugs that include cocaine, methamphetamine and ecstasy,” the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services said.

De Blasio insisted the new laws weren’t meant to crack down on Spice users, who are “amongst the most vulnerable in our city, and often include those who are dealing with mental health issues already,” rather to curtail distribution of the drug.

The K2 ban will take effect in 60 days.

[h/t DNAinfo New York]

A new study finds that lifting weights may “slow the age-related shrinking of some parts of our brai

Joe Biden Is Not Running for President

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Joe Biden Is Not Running for President

At a press conference this afternoon attended by President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden announced that he will not seek the Democratic nomination for president. Damn.

Biden said he spent months mulling the decision, which he said was complicated by the recent death of his son Beau.

“While I will not be a candidate, I will not be silent,” Biden said during the announcement, which sounded awfully like the stump speech that might have been. He later added that Democrats “should run” on Obama’s record, and he described what he hoped to accomplish if he’d decided to run and been elected.

“If I had done anything, I would have wanted to be the president that ended cancer,” he said. “Because it’s possible.”

http://gawker.com/beau-biden-son...

Image via AP.

Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

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Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

Here are the best of today’s deals. Get every great deal every day on Kinja Deals, follow us on Facebook and Twitter to never miss a deal, join us on Kinja Gear to read about great products, and on Kinja Co-Op to help us find the best.


More Deals

Today’s Best Gaming Deals​

http://deals.kinja.com/todays-best-ga...

Today’s Best Media Deals

http://deals.kinja.com/todays-best-me...

Today’s Best App Deals

http://deals.kinja.com/todays-best-ap...


Top Deals


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

If you’re in the market for a new action cam, and only the best will do, we’ve found terrific deals on the GoPro Hero4 Black and Hero4 Silver today.

GoPro HERO4 Black Starter Bundle ($426) | Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QL22OBO/...

GoPro HERO4 Black Camera Only ($390) | Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

GoPro HERO4 Silver Action Camera with Touch LCD Display ($329) | eBay

http://www.ebay.com/itm/GoPro-HERO...

GoPro Carry case by Smatree For GoPro Hero 4, 3+, 3, 2, 1 Camera ($10) | eBay

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1513953186...

http://gizmodo.com/the-best-actio...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

The iPhone 6 and 6s don’t have the amazing battery life of their oversized brethren, but this $33 battery case can more than make up the difference. You can even customize it with the included colored frames, which I’ve never seen before on a product like this. [1byone iPhone 6/6s 3100mAh Rainbow Battery Charger Case, $33 with code MPIZRLB9]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

Bluetooth earbuds are fantastic for working out, and these well-reviewed Aukeys are only $17 today. [Aukey Bluetooth V4.1 Wireless Stereo Sport Headphones, $17 with code VROW3ZI6]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

Or, add a smartphone arm band for just $3 more. [Aukey Bluetooth V4.1 Wireless Stereo Sport Headphones and Aukey Running Sport Sweatproof Armband, $20. Add both to cart and use code B84ZVKRT]

http://www.amazon.com/Armband-Aukey-...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

If you picked up a new 300ppi Kindle Paperwhite during Amazon’s sale (which is still going today), here’s a great deal on a case to keep it safe. It even locks and unlocks the device automatically with a magnetic clasp. [Inateck Kindle Paperwhite Cover Case for Amazon All-New Kindle Paperwhite, $9 with code K2MAX6JO]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JP7R85E

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OQVZDJM/

Note: This case will also work with previous generation Paperwhites.

More Kindle Deals:

Kindle ($60) | Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00I15SB16/

Kindle for Kids Bundle ($80) | Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XIV00EO/


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

Update: Now up to $30, and backordered.

Vacuum-insulated water bottles can keep liquids cold for an entire day, and this 40 ounce Hydro Flask is near its all-time low price today. If you like camping, hiking, or just working out outdoors, you can’t go wrong here. [Hydro Flask Insulated Stainless Steel Water Bottle, Wide Mouth, 40-Ounce, $27]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004X55L9I/...

If you still aren’t convinced, this was a finalist in our best water bottle Kinja Co-Op.

http://co-op.kinja.com/five-best-wate...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

If you’re an iPhone owner who wants to experiment with Android, or you just need a cheap, YouTube-compatible piece of glass to give to your kid, this LG G Pad 7 can get the job done for $67.

If should come as no surprise that this thing doesn’t have mind-blowing specs—the 1280x800 display seems particularly dated—but it runs Android Lollipop, and should be fine for videos, web browsing, and light games. [LG G Pad F, $67]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-LG-G-P...

As far as specs go, it seems pretty similar to Amazon’s new $50 Fire tablet, but it’s probably worth the $17 price premium to get access to Google’s services.

http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Display-W...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

Whether you want to keep your home safe, or you’re just tired of tripping on the front stoop at night, Amazon’s offering great deals on multipacks of Mr. Beams LED spotlights, today only.

$55 gets you six 80-lumen motion-sensing lights, while $90 will upgrade you to four 200-lumen models with built-in wireless networking, which allows them to light up simultaneously whenever one of them senses motion. Just note that they’re both part of a Gold Box deal, meaning these prices are only available today, or until sold out.

Mr Beams MBN354 Networked LED Wireless Motion Sensing Spotlight System, 200-Lumens, 4-Pack ($90) | Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

Mr. Beams MB316 Wireless LED Mini Spotlight with Motion Sensor and Photocell, 80-Lumens, 6-Pack ($55) | Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

As a gift to all you rugged outdoorsmen and weekend day hikers, Amazon’s taking 50% off a nice little selection of Danner shoes and boots. Just note that this is a Gold Box deal, meaning these prices are only available today, or until sold out. [50% Off Danner Shoes and Boots]


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

Apple’s top-of-the-line 15” MacBook Pro is probably overkill for most people, but if you expect a lot out of your laptop, you won’t find a better deal than this. The $2,500 model is all the way down to $1950 on eBay today, which is actually less than the MSRP of the base model 15” Pro.

$1950 is still a lot of money, but it buys you a whole lot of computer. We’re talking a 2.5GHz quad-core i7, 512GB SSD, 16GB of RAM, a discrete AMD Radeon R9 M370X graphics card, and a 2880x1800 retina display. Aside from a few minor build-to-order spec upgrades, this is the most powerful portable computer Apple has ever shipped, and if you’ve been on the fence about getting one, a 20% discount is basically unheard of. [Apple MacBook Pro 15”, $1950]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-MacB...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

We’ve posted a few deals on paracord survival bracelets in the past, and $7 would be a good price for any of them. Today though, that price gets you two of them.

If you aren’t familiar, these bracelets include a flint fire starter and a whistle in the buckle, and you can unwrap them in an emergency into about 12’ of high-strength paracord. Hopefully, you’re never in a situation where you need to do that, but if you spend a lot of time outdoors, it’s not a bad idea to keep one of these on your wrist. [Attmu Outdoor Survival Paracord Bracelet with Fire Starter and Whistle, Set of 2, $7 with code 3FTQQHQZ]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00Q84F520/...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

Kmashi makes some of the most popular (not to mention cheapest) USB charging gear on the market, and they’re offering a pair of fantastic deals today.

KMASHI 10,000mAh External Battery Power Bank ($9) | Amazon | Use code YTI7MT89

http://www.amazon.com/KMASHI-10000mA...

Kmashi Car Quick Charge 2.0, 3 Ports 39W USB Turbo Car Charger Adapter ($10) | amazon | Use code M58K9GU4

http://www.amazon.com/Kmashi-Charger...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

Really, could we highlight any other media deal today?

Back To The Future: 30th Anniversary Trilogy ($25) | Best Buy

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/back-to-t...

Back To The Future: The Complete Adventures ($50) | Best Buy

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/back-to-t...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

The PlayStation 4 just dropped to $350, but if you buy the Nathan Drake Collection bundle for the old price today, you’ll also get Guitar Hero Live with a guitar controller, which retails for $99 on its own. [PlayStation 4 500GB Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection and Guitar Hero Live Bundle, $399]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01...

If you already have a console, Prime members can save $10 on their Guitar Hero Live preorder on Xbox One or PS4. Just remember that you won’t see the discount until checkout. [Guitar Hero Live, $89. Prime members only. Discount shown at checkout.]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VEPK97Y/...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

We’ve spotted great deals on Nintendo and Sony’s respective handheld gaming consoles today, including an all-time low price for the Vita.

Note: The 3DS XL is not the new model.

Refurb Nintendo 3DS XL New Super Mario Bros 2 Limited Edition Handheld Console ($140) | Monoprice

http://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=1...

PlayStation Vita ($160) | eBay

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1217534198...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

We’ve been seeing more and more deals on Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0-compatible USB chargers, but this is the best one we’ve spotted to date on a compatible battery pack.

$22 is a decent price for any 15,000mAh USB battery; this one just happens to have a Quick Charge port to juice up your compatible phone even faster. [Aukey Quick Charge 2.0 15,000mAh External Battery, $22 with code VLS2CENC]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

Just because you bought a Chromebook doesn’t mean you have to settle for a tiny, low res screen. This Acer Chromebook 15 sports an expansive 15.6” 1080p display, 4GB of RAM, and up to 9 hours of battery life.

Perhaps best of all though, your purchase comes bundled with a dozen GoGo in-flight internet passes. You have to use them within a year of redemption, but if you fly frequently enough, they could be worth more than you paid for the computer. [Acer Chromebook 15 (15.6-Inch Full HD IPS, 4GB RAM, 16GB SSD), $249]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TU7U4PU/...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

One Lightning cable for $8 is a pretty good deal. Two for $8 is a must-buy if you own any Apple devices. [2-Pack Lightning Cables, $8 with code DG5Q7LYT]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

Halo 5: Guardians is only a week away, and you can prepare yourself with a $50 discount on this limited edition 1TB Xbox One. $450 gets you the console, a special Halo-themed controller, a download code for the game (plus a bunch of requisition packs), and even exclusive, Halo-themed console sound effects. [Halo 5 Guardians Limited Edition Xbox One Bundle, $450]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Microsoft-...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

You might not think there’s much room to innovate in the slot toaster space, but this Cuisinart packs in a digital shade setting display with seven levels of doneness, plus dedicated bagel, defrost, and reheat buttons. It also looks really nice, and is priced about $30 less than usual. [Cuisinart CPT-435 Countdown 4-Slice Stainless Steel Toaster, $50 for Prime members only]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009L1VUA8/...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

If you enjoy cooking, and you don’t own a KitchenAid mixer, it’s a pretty safe assumption that you want one. You can pick up a refurb of the KitchenAid Artisan mixer on eBay today in a spectrum of colors for just $170, the lowest price we’ve ever seen. [Refurb KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixer, $170]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Kitchenaid...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

Monoprice is currently offering their popular 28” 4K monitor for just $380, the best price we’ve ever seen. That’s one of the lowest prices we’ve ever seen for a 60Hz 4K display, and a great buy if your computer can support it.

I did a lot of personal research into this monitor a few months back, and was one discount away from pulling the trigger before a deal on a Dell alternative caught my eye. [Monoprice CrystalPro 28” 4K Monitor, $380 with code DISPLAY5]

http://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=1...

So is 4K worth it for gaming? If your computer can handle it, absolutely.

http://kotaku.com/i-built-a-4k-u...


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

You guys buy boatloads of IR thermometers whenever we post a deal, and it’s easy to see why. They’re a ton of fun to mess around with, and can come in handy for everything from cooking to home energy savings.

http://lifehacker.com/how-to-check-y...

http://gizmodo.com/whats-your-fav...

If you still don’t own one, you can rectify that for just $13 today! [Dr.Meter IR-20 Non-contact Digital Laser IR Infrared Thermometer Temperature Gun, $13 with code 34N2WPJC]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R19ANCS


Today's Best Deals: iPhone Battery Case, Cheap GoPros, 50% off Boots, and More

Today on eBay, you can grab an iPad Air 2 64GB for less than the MSRP of the paltry 16GB model. That’s basically like quadrupling your storage for free. [iPad Air 2 64GB, $490]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-iPad...


Tech


Power

http://www.amazon.com/KMASHI-10000mA...

Audio

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

Home Theater

Computers & Accessories

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TU7U4PU/...

PC Parts

Mobile Devices

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B012N1HCGI

Photography

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QL22OBO/...


Home


http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0031M9H3A/...

Beauty & Grooming

Kitchen

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004X55L9I/...

Fitness

Apparel

Camping & Outdoors

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00Q84F520/...

Tools & Auto

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MFH50OW/...


Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here to learn more. We want your feedback.

Send deal submissions to Deals@Gawker and all other inquiries to Shane@Gawker


All the Dumb Pundits and Reporters Who Said Biden Was Definitely Running for President

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All the Dumb Pundits and Reporters Who Said Biden Was Definitely Running for President

Vice President Joe Biden announced in a speech in the White House’s Rose Garden today that he is not running for president. This is a real bummer for the American public, which deserves, if nothing else, more election entertainment. It’s an even bigger bummer for all the pundits and political journalists who confidently reported—with sources and everything—that Biden was going to run.

http://gawker.com/joe-biden-is-n...

Bill Kristol, the neoconservative scion with a long and well-documented history of making incorrect predictions about elections (among other things), was chief among those trumpeting wrong intel that Biden was mounting a campaign to rival Hillary Clinton’s.

But plenty of other pundits and reporters—ones generally taken more seriously than Kristol—had “sources” who told them the same. Like Fox News’ Chief White House Correspondent Ed Henry:

And the Rubin Report’s Dave Rubin:

And the National Post’s Diane Francis.

Even those within Congress had sources. Rep. Brendan Boyle, of Philly, announced this confidently on Monday:

Other pundits just had a good feeling that Biden was going to run, like the Washington Post’s Chris Cilliza:

And Fox News analyst Monica Crowley.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer visited Fox News on Monday to predict that Biden would run as an “insurance policy” in case Clinton was indicted by the FBI, or something.

New York’s Gabriel Sherman dedicated his entire column Friday to the incorrect notion that Joe Biden was running. “Joe Biden is running for president—a fact that has been obvious, and true, for weeks,” he wrote.

Gay rights activist Chely Wright predicted just this morning that Biden would run, but regret it:

And CNN’s Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash reported Monday that Biden was staffing up his campaign.

Even Vox’s Ezra Klein tentatively suggested Biden was in.

The Alex Jones show, naturally, reported Biden was running as some kind of Obama conspiracy.

But one source, Vice President Joe Biden, announced today that he is, actually, not running for president.

Gabriel Sherman, Ed Henry, Monica Crowley—respected professionals at the very top of their chosen field—were all on the same side as Alex Jones, and all turned out to be just as correct.

Photo via AP. Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

Police: Reporter Started Car Fire That Left Her With Burns Over 75 Percent of Her Body

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Police: Reporter Started Car Fire That Left Her With Burns Over 75 Percent of Her Body

In a bizarre and tragic story out of Alabama, police say the car fire that left a local college football reporter with burns over the majority of her body was started by the reporter herself.

Early the morning of September 8, police responded to a call of a car fire near an apartment complex in Hoover, a suburb of Birmingham. Natalie Pierre Williams, a 26-year-old college football reporter for AL.com, was found near the car, covered in burns. Her husband, Chasten Leigh Williams, 30, told responding police he and his wife had been in a minor car accident, after which he’d walked back to their apartment. He said he returned a few minutes later to find the car in flames, and pulled his wife to safety.

After a “thorough and exhaustive investigation,” Hoover police announced today that the blaze was set intentionally by Williams herself, who apparently walked to a gas station after the crash, purchased two gallons of gasoline and a lighter, and then set the car on fire while she was inside it.

From AL.com’s summary of the investigation’s findings:

The crash itself was not serious. It caused minor front-end damage when the vehicle struck a small tree. It is not known what caused the driver to leave the roadway and strike the tree.

Both occupants acknowledge there was a verbal domestic argument prior to the crash.

Debris samples taken from the interior of the vehicle were sent to a laboratory for analysis.

Those samples tested positive for an accelerant — gasoline.

A wand-style lighter was found in a grassy area near the vehicle.

Melted remnants from a two-gallon gasoline container were found inside the vehicle.

Surveillance video from a nearby convenience store shows Natalie Pierre Williams purchasing a wand-style lighter, a two-gallon gas can and a gallon of gasoline several minutes before the fire was reported.

Hoover Police Capt. Gregg Rector said despite the findings, no charges will be filed in the case.

“Our goal was always to determine the facts and establish how this fire started and what caused it,” he said, according to AL.com. “It was clearly suspicious in nature from the beginning but very challenging to get to the point we are today.”

Rector said police still aren’t sure whether Williams intended to harm herself, though the he noted that she and her husband have a history of domestic disputes, which necessitated three visits from police in June and July alone.

“This was a sad, horrific situation that involved a young lady who is still battling very serious injuries,” he said. “She still has a long road to recovery and we certainly hope she is able to heal. She needs everyone’s support.”

Willams, who’s been hospitalized since the incident, has reportedly recovered enough that she’s able to speak with friends and family.

10 Big Myths About Video Games, Debunked By The People Who Make Them

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10 Big Myths About Video Games, Debunked By The People Who Make Them

Today, more people than ever before are playing video games...but most people still don’t actually understand how games are made. Even for hardcore game aficionados, game development remains fairly shrouded in mystery.

What’s more, a lot of what people think they know about game development is actually misconception. We spoke to a number of game developers who told us about the biggest things people get wrong about game development, and below is where, in their own words, these developers debunk common myths.

Misconception: Game Developers Are Lazy

This, by far, is the most common thing that developers brought up when discussing prevalent game development misconceptions. Over and over again, developers described situations where players called them “lazy”—and this couldn’t be further from the truth. Game development is often grueling, and it’s not uncommon to hear about people putting in way over 40 hours of work a week just to get a game shipped on time. This is known as “crunch,” and it happens just as often on critically acclaimed games as it does games you might find in a bargain bin.

“We work in a culture of overtime, crunch and death marches,” one triple-A game developer who wished to remain anonymous told me in an interview. “People put their physical and mental health on the line every time, some even lose their families to our industry’s overtime culture.

“We do from 3 to 6 months of crunch on any given project and it’s considered NORMAL in our industry,” the developer said. “People with families, older devs get discriminated against all the time because it’s thought they can’t sustain the ‘normal’ work pace, which is ridiculously long hours as the norm, or crunch for months on end.

“We get told to accept lower salaries because of our ‘passion’ for gaming, we sacrifice our healths and families to overtime to get the game done... and then some jackass decides we’re lazy because a bug is still in the game, or a feature they wanted isn’t there? Fuck that shit.”

Misconception: Game Development Is Easy

Here’s Armin Ibrisagic of Coffee Stain Studios, the folks behind Goat Simulator, describing a common game development misunderstanding:

I think the biggest misconception people have is when it comes to the time and effort taken to make games.

I remember when I worked at an FPS/Tower Defense game called Sanctum 2. In Sanctum 1, we had a server browser where you’d manually have to find a map you like, but in Sanctum 2, we’d just let people pick a map and then we’d use matchmaking to fill up the map with other players who wanted to play that same map. Much better and easier, right? But people still wanted a server browser, and they wouldn’t stop making threads about it on the forums. This one guy was like “well you had a server browser in Sanctum 1, can’t you just copy-paste the code into Sanctum 2?” ARRGHH - You can’t just copy-paste an entire server browser from one game to another!

This “game development is easy” myth usually goes hand-in-hand with the misconception of “lazy developers”. People who don’t work in game development don’t understand that game development is a constant compromise between good content/features, and time/resources.

Misconception: A Good Idea Is All a Game Needs

Chandana Ekanayake of Uber Entertainment would like to set the record straight on how games evolve during the course of development:

Ideas are seductive and perfect. How cool would it be to fight zombies while riding dinosaurs with your friends in a galaxy as big as No Man’s Sky? How about a Far Cry game set in the Star Wars universe playing as Han Solo? How about strapping rockets to a moon and sending it hurtling against another planet, destroying your enemies? A space combat game that’s also a seamless FPS? Ideas are the fun part of game development when anything is possible. Most games that start out as an idea are rarely like that idea when they ship or don’t live up to the expectation of that first idea. Sometimes realities of production get in the way and most times when a game gets to prototyping stage, you find that that idea makes for shitty gameplay. This hasn’t usually been an issue as players don’t see the game until it’s been prototyped, iterated on and proven out.

With the volume of crowdfunded games it’s certainly turned into a problem for both developers and players. A player backs a game based on a slick pitch and expects the game to deliver on the promises of that pitch. Anytime an idea is mentioned during development on a forum, live stream, or Tweet, fans treat those as confirmed features. A developer treats an idea as a starting point and expects things to change during development. This disconnect is what causes trouble. There’s a whole lot of unsexy grind during game development that takes up a lot of time that gets glossed over when developers pitch games. Any added feature has a cost to development time. Things like optimizing, development tools, asset organization, updating middleware, testing and bug fixing can take up a significant portion of development that have zero to do with implementing features that the player is excited about. Things always take longer than you think. There’s no one solution to this problem other than constant communication and not over promise.

Misconception: DLC Is Evil

Nowadays, developers often announce plans for downloadable content well before the release of the actual game in question. For some people, this acts as proof that developers are out to sucker as much money as possible from the player, who may believe that they are expected to spend money on an “incomplete” game. The reality of DLC is more complex than that, though.

“I see a lot of disparaging of Day 1 DLC especially, but I wish the gaming public understood that in many cases this is in no way taking away from the core title,” Elizabeth Zelle, a games user researcher at Deep Silver Volition, told me in an email. “[DLC] is teams continuing to generate digital content, that doesn’t need to be finished months before the street date like the core title does.”

For developers, having something to work on in-between major releases is huge. Yes, that’s partially because DLC is profitable. But! DLC also provides much-needed security in an industry with an abundance of layoff horror stories.

“In the past you would see large layoffs when a game submitted because there simply wasn’t any more work for a lot of the devs on a team,” Zelle said. “The same studio would start hiring back up months later when their next project got to the point of needing that large team again. DLC production, the employment it provides devs, and the bonus income it generates to pay them works to keep game studios out of the layoff-hire back cycles and lets game devs enjoy a more stable life.”

Misconception: All Game Developers Are Rich

It’s easy to get swept up in all the dolla dolla billz floating around in this industry. You read about games that cost millions to make. You hear about deals that net game developers billions. You look at the swank mansions that gaming YouTubers buy. It’s easy to think that every game developer is swimming in cash, but that’s not actually the case.

“I’m lucky,” Cliff Bleszinski, co-founder of Boss Key Productions, told me in an email. “I may have worked my butt off for years and made some great games with some great people, but Tim Sweeney was a very kind boss who treated his earliest employees very well. For every person like me that’s been successful there are hundreds of developers that are just getting by.”

Misconception: Realistic Graphics Mean a Better Game

Shawn Allen, designer of Treachery in Beatdown City, thinks that people are seduced really easily by photorealistic games—which can leave titles with “beautiful aesthetics” and “exaggerated features” in the dust.

“Pixel art is devalued as a medium because it is considered ‘easy’ when really, ease of creation is not and should never be the only metric for examining art,” Allen wrote in an email.

There’s a danger in valuing realistic graphics so much, Allen says.

“There is a great deal hyperbolic fervor for the newer, bigger worlds featured in games regardless of if they are bringing anything new to the table. Again, [for most people] frames per second & texture resolution trumps art direction.”

Misconception: Everything a Developer Does Is for Profit

Matthew Medina of ArenaNet says that, while developers do have to making a living, making more money doesn’t necessarily drive everything they do:

It is true that there ARE certain design decisions which are made that do in fact hinge on maximizing VALUE (not profits) - but in reality in my experience those design decisions usually boil down to the dev team looking at it from the standpoint of [return on investment] - does it make sense to put X number of developers and Y numbers of dollars towards a feature or a piece of content that you can reliably predict won’t generate adequate revenue to warrant that investment? At the end of the day game studios are businesses where it behooves all employees to be weighing these things to some degree. But I will say that in my 23 year career, I’ve never felt as though any employer of mine was ever out to get as much money as possible from their players (and I worked at EA...twice).

Misconception: Game Developers Don’t Care About Bugs

When you play a game, any bugs you come across might seem obvious. I often read comments and forum posts where people are flabbergasted that nobody caught a certain hiccup that thousands of people online encountered right away. Here’s how something like that can happen, according to A Hat in Time developer Dan Tsukasa:

Players completely overlook that a bug requires a very very specific set of circumstances to be met in order to crop up. Sure it might appear [during a certain common situation] but it [also] only appears if you have X number of items, Y amount of ammo, have killed exactly 20 soldiers all before the game’s timer hits 12:01 and 0.003 milliseconds—that’s when the bug crops up, in that seemingly random circumstance. Bugs are a combination of many many factors coming together at the same time; it’s almost never a simple “Ah, it’s exactly this value we need to fix.” You could play the game for 20 years and never encounter it, whilst a new player could encounter [the same bug] in 5 minutes. It’s up to chance. Players give developers like us a really hard time for this one.

Misconception: “Casual” Games Don’t Matter

Robert Yang, developer of erotic games such as Cobra Club and Hurt Me Plenty, thinks that people underestimate just how important “casual” games actually are:

The Kim Kardashian game, across iOS and Android, has at least as many installs as DOTA2 if not many more — except DOTA2 is #1 on Steam by far, while the Kardashian game is just one of many huge mobile hits with tens of millions of users.

I think what people don’t understand (and what I barely comprehend myself) is the magnitudes of all these numbers. Gamers were shocked that Bioshock Infinite selling five million units was deemed a “failure” — well, maybe we wouldn’t have been shocked if we knew that Clash of Clans has several hundred million downloads on Android alone... and was probably much cheaper to make, market, and maintain.

Gamers want to deny this because it upends a lot of our ideas about which games deserve to be considered popular or successful; games with novelty, systemic depth, high artistic intent, expensive production values... the Kim Kardashian game has none of these things, but by the numbers, it is so much more successful and culturally influential than practically any “real” game on Steam.

Misconception: Players Always Know What’s Best for a Game

Fans are defined by passion—they often know a franchise inside and out, and have very strong feelings about the way things should work in a game. Often, people can be vocal about the changes they want to see, especially on forums and comments section. But catering to fan demands doesn’t necessarily make for a better game, according to the founder of Panache Games.

“If we [listened] to the public and the general feedback [from players] Assasin’s Creed would have [had] dragons and monsters…and nobody would die in Game of Thrones,” Patrice Désilets, creator of Assassin’s Creed, joked in an email.

BONUS ROUND

While many developers couldn’t chat with me one-on-one, I was provided with a deluge of opinions on game development misconceptions on Twitter. Here are some of the best Tweets:

And finally, here’s a funny anecdote by Abbie Heppe of Respawn Entertainment:

We had some guys in to fix our office shower last week and one guy was standing outside my office explaining to his coworker what we do. “They have a shower cause they’re here all the time. They have some guys that just work on graphics and since it’s a multiplayer game, what if a player reaches a point in the game and the graphics aren’t done yet?! So they have to be here all the time.” Long hours are definitely NOT why we have a shower - we added one because we have a really active company with lots of people who run or cycle or workout. We all got a kick out of it, but you can’t really blame the guy for not knowing about our jobs. On the flip side we have no idea how to fix the shower.

Illustration: Sam Woolley.

Man Allegedly Crashes Wedding, Then Bites Cop and Police Dog

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Man Allegedly Crashes Wedding, Then Bites Cop and Police Dog

“Dog bites man.” That is, canonically, not News. But “Man crashes wedding, bites cop and police dog (police dog also bites cop)?” That’s what Santa Barbara, Calif., police say occurred on Saturday night, and it is News, my friends. News!

Sgt. Riley Harwood of the SBPD told the Associated Press that a 22-year-old wedding crasher got into a confrontation with two officers after guests booted him from a reception at the Santa Barbara Carriage Museum.

The man, who was later identified as Jorge Rodriguez of Goleta, Calif., had been wandering outside the wedding “claiming people were trying to kill him,” Harwood told the Santa Barbara Independent.

When the officers confronted him, Rodriguez allegedly punched one of them in the face and bit his shoulder, knocking him to the ground. In the ensuing fight, police say, a K-9 dog bit Rodriguez in the shoulder, and Rodriguez retaliated by biting the dog’s leg . At that point, the dog apparently became confused (Man bites dog! It’s confusing!) and bit the officer who was already down.

Police said the fight lasted six minutes.

Once Rodriguez was finally handcuffed, Harwood added, he tried to fight a third officer.

The alleged wedding crasher is currently in the hospital, and the SBPD is waiting to arrest him for resisting arrest resulting in injury and battery on a police dog. He was reportedly already on probation for battery at the time of the fight.

The dog is fine. It went to the vet.

This has been News.

[Photo via the fourth-best Vince Vaughn movie (and 13th-best Owen Wilson movie), Wedding Crashers (2005)]

The Kidz Bop Is All Right: A Night Alone With America's Shrillest Pop Franchise

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The Kidz Bop Is All Right: A Night Alone With America's Shrillest Pop Franchise

As I took my divinely ordained place in a long line of screaming six-year-olds in puffy jackets outside the “Kidz Bop: Make Some Noise” tour stop at a 500-cap venue in Manhattan, I experienced the unfortunately familiar sensation of walking towards something truly off-putting but feeling, instead of trepidation, a deep certainty that I belong.

It was dusk on a colorless Sunday. The mother in front of me glanced over her shoulder and scooted her kid up in line. “Stay where I can see you,” she whispered, glancing again.

At the door, the bouncer scanned the ticket. “Just one?” he asked. “For Kidz Bop?”

“Yeah,” I said, and walked in.


Kidz Bop, the babies-cover-the-hits franchise that occupies about a fifth of the children’s music market and routinely lands albums in the Billboard Top 10, is the brainchild of two canny ex-lawyers named Craig Balsam and Cliff Chenfeld, who in the ’90s started making good money packaging radio hits into CD collections and selling them via direct-order on cable TV. (Their biggest hit, before Kidz Bop, was the ubiquitous Monster Ballads.)

Around the turn of the century, Balsam and Chenfeld, according to Bloomberg, noticed the Eminem-psychotic, Britney-sexy edge creeping into the pop music market and decided to “split the difference” between the radio hits that parents didn’t want their kids listening to and the children’s music that their parents couldn’t stand. The first Kidz Bop collection came out auspiciously (September 2001), featuring a murderer’s row of aesthetically bleeped bangers: there was “All The Small Things” and “That Don’t Impress Me Much,” the one-two punch of “Blue” and then “Summer Girls,” Sugar Ray’s “Fly,” and so on.

On this first CD, the vocals and instrumentation are at about a local-jingle level of professionalism, and—as would be true for a few years—there aren’t actually very many kids. The lead vocalists sound like adult choir directors for a Christian summer camp; the children sing in the background and on choruses, harmonizing shallowly. “This is one CD that my kids and I can listen to together,” says a catalogue mom in the TV spot.

Both my younger brother and I were too old for Kidz Bop at the time, so I remained only hazily aware of the idea until an extremely weed-heavy portion of my freshman year at college, which was the same year that “Since U Been Gone” was the best song in the world.

The Kidz Bop cover of Kelly Clarkson was the opener of Kidz Bop 8, an album that still featured adult vocalists but went heavier on the youth and slightly better with the backing tracks. The selection on this one was particularly tight—there was “1, 2 Step,” “1 Thing,” and “Karma”—but I don’t think I ever found cause to listen to the album at the time. The Trojan horse to the Kidz Bop kingdom was one child in the “Since U Been Gone” video:

The Kidz Bop Is All Right: A Night Alone With America's Shrillest Pop Franchise

That kid is basically my Walt Whitman. He is a paragon of individual intensity. Kid, I Bop somewhere, waiting for you.


The majority of the crowd at Kidz Bop looked to be mostly in the first-to-third grade range, which is to say, this was a population guaranteed to respond very strongly to a man wearing light-up Kanye glasses and screaming, “You have been given permission to make some noise!” Crowding the stage was a kid mosh pit of sorts, with a ring of parents hovering closely behind, only about 15 percent of whom would eventually relax enough to dance with their kids.

I stood at the back of the floor, terrified to step on or offend either of my two sets of peers. Very slowly, I inched towards the bar. “No, I’m not okay!” screamed the bartender. A floor staffer had just inquired how she was doing. “We! Need! More! Candy!” she howled.

A dad walked away with a double, sipping. A woman hawked light-up microphones. “I’ll take five,” rasped a mom, desperately pulling out cash. The Kidz Bop Hype Man screamed, “Who’s ready to see the Kidz Bop Kids?” and the crowd reached a pitch so unhinged and doglike that I choked on my beer. And then four 13-year-olds ran out onstage in tracksuits, like miniature cruise ship directors from a casting company specializing in Future America, the caramel and queer. It took me the entire show, plus intermission, to hear their names right.

Cam, Maria, Ashley, and Brant, I typed into my phone, as they played electric guitars for a Meghan Trainor song and standing toms for Bastille. They sang “K-I-D-Z, got my name in bold” for “Fancy” and did a capella harmony for “Happy.” They put on beanies and pulled out trash cans to drum on for “Rude,” which almost ended me. They made moms do an ‘80s karaoke competition and made dads do a countrified “Gangnam Style” competition and wined within a certain prescribed range of hip motion and shilled their own social media accounts. They did aerials across the stage wearing light-up pleather and used a pitch pipe to test each others’ perfect pitch. Ashton (??), I wrote, did A+ and F++ woww! Other ones named Brad, Freya, and Greg??

It’s actually Matt (Martinez), Bredia (Santoro), Ashlynn (Chong), and Grant (Knoche). They’re the third iteration, again according to Bloomberg, of the Kidz Bop Menudo Model, in which the session tweens of cut-rate yore have been replaced by Branded Faces, more Disney star than demo singer—although, of course, the difference between the two is slight.

Kidz Bop used to put out two albums a year and bank on CD sales, but now you can’t do the latter. So they’ve expanded, releasing an album every quarter, running an XM station, fronting a YouTube channel (millions upon millions of views, of course) and sending their Kidz out for 45-show tours.

And—watch them, they’re good. The Kidz are all right! Live, they have the ease, exuberance, stamina and projected generosity of pop stars, even if they understandably haven’t developed the same levels of control. Through an extremely taxing 90-minute set, they let fatigue flicker across their faces occasionally, and frequently landed on the very edge of their notes. But in a general sense, they were really out there: their backing track was no louder than it is with plenty of buzzy pop acts currently, and they’ve got much less processing on the sound. They also dance much more than most performers today, and much better. The girls give off restless Mouseketeer—they visibly keep their flirtatiousness PG in the same way that Taylor Swift, live, exerts obvious effort to get hers up to PG-13—and the boys, hustling and charming, give off baby Jason Derulo, or maybe baby Ne-Yo.

I wondered what they would move on to. Kidz Bop turns the age corner sharply: consumers lose interest well before double digits, and for performers, the only workable spot is “tween.” I bet two of them will be famous-ish, I wrote. Past Kidz Bop alumni include Zendaya, who now has her own Barbie doll, and Becky G, who’s nailing it on Empire, and an actor who played the son in the Anna Nicole Smith movie (starring Willa Ford, the “I Wanna Be Bad” girl—oh, the constellations of minor stardom!), and someone named Noah Munck whose Wikipedia says he “produces trap music under the name NoxiK” and also that he was born in 1996.

But we graduate away from ourselves constantly. The toddlers around me would never know what they looked like, bouncing on dad shoulders; the cliques of third-grade girlfriends dancing around me would forget all their old games, their jokes. I used to love performing in a way that I can’t quite remember now. I was in choirs, competed as a gymnast, spent months on runs of multiple musicals per year. I think I was lucky: just competent enough to participate, never sufficiently talented to have ambitions. My poor mother drove carpool for hours just because her daughter liked the practice of it, wanted to learn something pretty, to dress up and dance with her friends.


Kidz Bop has sold 15.4 million albums since its inception. With the recent production bump of four albums a year, the output moves so quickly that songs that are still contemporaneous on radio will be spread across four or five collections: their most-streamed song on Spotify, “Shake It Off,” was from Kidz Bop 27, three albums ago.

“Shake It Off” contains one of the great pleasures of Kidz Bop, which is the nitpicking, censoring word switch. “My ex boy brought his new girlfriend,” blap the singers on the bridge, “she’s like, oh my god, but, I’m just gonna shake it.” If you’re keeping track, it’s actually Taylor Swift’s man that’s inappropriate, but in another song, the word god might’ve been bleeped, as it is on the Kidz version of “You Found Me,” by the Fray. The franchise’s code for what is and isn’t appropriate is shifting and wonderfully inconsistent: they tend to avoid hip-hop, but the latest Kidz Bop (number 30) includes Silento’s “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae),” in which the verse about stanky leg is voided but the one about “supermanning” remains. In “California Gurls,” it’s a sun-kissed beach, but it’ll still melt your popsicle. In “Come and Get It,” Selena’s “open invitation” waits for you still.

You can’t truly scrub sex out of top 40. But Kidz Bop is a testament to the fact that you can’t scrub the innocence out of it, either—the tackiness, the cheese. The contrast is often insanely, stupidly funny: I spent half of the show laughing helplessly to myself, as Kidz Bop Ashlynn snarled with her latex skirt and electric guitar through a bleeped Meghan Trainor line (“I’m bringing pretty baaaaack,” she sang, sounding vocally more adult than Meghan Trainor). Sometimes the foursome would hop out of a full club pop-and-lock groove to strike a pose, elementary-school-talent-show style, and yell “Kidz Bop!!”

In a dream, the franchise would play their extremes up even sharper to hit either thematic poignancy (“If I Were A Boy” is pretty appropriate, with kids singing it) or the G.I. Joe overdub sweet spot that awaits them: there’s a fake Kidz Bop version of “Coco” on YouTube that’s magnificent (and why not—it could be “cocoa”). In another dream, the franchise would use the angelic awkwardness of kid voices to better effect in their arrangements, flushing the tracks with vocal harmonies, like P.S. 22 does. They flirt with this tactic, sometimes, as in their very moving version of “The Club Can’t Even Handle Me Right Now.”

But mostly, Kidz Bop just roves indiscriminately around Top 40, benefiting from the fact that there are plenty of hits so saccharine that they almost sound better when sung by children—the Kidz Bop versions of “Thrift Shop,” “All About That Bass” and “Happy” sound like final edits on the original tracks—and also the fact that most big-budget pop tracks are too hooky and also too generic to truly, even with kiddie alteration, sound bad.

On their recordings, they negotiate bringing Kidz and Bop together through basic mix and match, the specifics of which have changed throughout the years. Their early albums used explicitly childish backing tracks, plus adults on lead vocals, plus kid voices occasionally chiming in. Then, they hit a brief period where they upgraded the instrumentation to a truer facsimile but let kid vocalists that truly sounded like kid vocalists—artless, gawky—take the lead. The effect was very dumb, and very wonderful. These kiddos, singing “No Air,” have no idea what words they’re saying:

And neither do the two or three youthful souls who are struggling valiantly through Keri Hilson’s opening verse on “Knocks You Down”:

Now, though, they are using kid vocalists like Matt and Bredia and Ashlynn and Grant, who know how to manipulate their voices like adults do. The new Kidz, switching off on “Elastic Heart,” sing taut and brassy, flip silvery and loose. They bell and distort their vowels in a credible Sia impression—yeah another one bites the doirst—and the kidzy production is only slightly softened from the original, even pleasantly so, as it is on “Where Are U Now.” A decade and a half after it was born in a money machine, Kidz Bop’s sound has started asymptotically approaching what the franchise by definition must differentiate themselves against, which is actual pop music.

That only goes for the recordings, thankfully. Live, it was much dumber, which made it much better—just a bunch of kids. The four onstage cranked through songs like workhorses, assuring hundreds of slightly younger children that they were “THE BEST! AUDIENCE! EVER!!” as a few blessed parents raged their faces off and the rest of them murmured stone-faced to each other about dinner and parking and the train. “You’re so pretty-beautiful,” the Kidz Bop Kidz sang on their Nick Jonas cover, “and everyone likes you too, that’s why!”

I hadn’t been around so many kids in a long time, had forgotten the exhausting and comforting way they remind you that time barrels all of us straight into forgetfulness. Me, I can’t remember a single specific performance out of hundreds, squirming under makeup and burning myself on curling irons and pulling leotard wedgies out of my butt. I was just practicing, like the toddlers at the show were practicing keeping their eyes open, and the six-year-olds were practicing being out at night, and the parents were practicing being generous to their children, and the Kidz Bop Kids were practicing what it feels like to nail something, at any age. Out of 90 minutes, they only blew one note completely: it was one of the guys, who yelped “Whoa!” right after, and let out a real giggle. It was great.


Image via YouTube

Contact the author at jia@jezebel.com.

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