The New York Times has fired its first female executive editor, Jill Abramson, citing the need for a change and "an issue with management in the newsroom." 

But the New Yorker's Ken Auletta, who profiled Abramson in 2011, has taken to his staff blog to discuss the alleged real reason behind Abramson's abrupt departure: She asked for equal pay.

The Times has tapped popular Managing Editor Dean Baquet to replace Abramson. Baquet, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former investigative reporter, becomes the paper's first African-American executive editor.

While initially noting that the reason for the switch was not immediately clear in a brief announcement about the change, the Times updated their report to include more details about the swift firing and a statement from the 60 year old Abramson, who started at the company in 1997 and had held the position for three years. 

"I’ve loved my run at The Times,” Abramson said. “I got to work with the best journalists in the world doing so much stand-up journalism." The Times also noted that she cited her appointment of women to senior editing positions as one of her notable achievements.

But Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. told the newsroom Abramson was leaving over friction with management:

“I chose to appoint a new leader for our newsroom because I believe that new leadership will improve some aspects of the management of the newsroom,” he said. “You will understand that there is nothing more that I want to say about this. We had an issue with management in the newsroom. And that’s what’s at the heart of this issue.”

Auletta, however, reports that in addition to "the management's narrative" that Abramson was "pushy," relations between Sulzberger and Abramson broke down over three primary issues: equal pay, a decision she made to hire a new staff member, and the issue of marketing intrusion into the editorial side of the paper. 

The first issue, according to Auletta, was that Abramson discovered she was receiving less in salary and benefits than her predecessor. Not only that, but during the time she had served as managing editor of the newsroom, Abramson learned that her deputy managing editor had been making more than she had. Abramson allegedly hired a lawyer to make "polite inquiries" into the status of her salary relative to her male co-workers and predecessors. According to an unnamed associate of Abramson, this move "set them off."

The second issue is that Abramson, allegedly believing she had the full support of Sulzberger and company C.E.O. Mark Thompson, tried to hire a new deputy digital managing editor, who would oversee the website and report to Baquet. However, Abramson's alleged failure to consult Baquet caused him to take the matter up with Sulzberger.

This account contradicts a statement Salzburger reportedly made to Times reporters earlier Wednesday, in which he apparently claimed that Abramson "[tried] to hire a senior editor from outside the newspaper to share a co-managing editor title with Mr. Baquet."

The final named issue is one of policy : Abramson balked at the encroachment of native advertising into the editorial content of the newspaper. This allegedly caused her to clash with Thompson. Again, this contradicts Sulzberger's statements about Abramson's departure; he reportedly told editors the decision had nothing to do with the state of relations between the business and editorial departments of the Times.

At the time of her firing, Abramson had allegedly hired a consultant to work on her management and leadership skills, presumably because she had a reputation as being difficult—a familiar narrative of women in professional positions of power.

The news also comes on the same day that Le Monde's first female editor-in-chief Natalie Nougayrède resigned after only a year in the role, citing "direct and personal attacks" made against her by staff who resisted her planned changes for the paper.

In reaction, Twitter media pundits, female professionals, and feminists began discussing Abramson's departure as a cautionary tale, a sign that the "Lean In" approach—a philosophy of professional advancement for women espoused by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandburg—was no guarantee of safety at the highest levels of business.

It also comes on the heels of social media discussions of the way women are treated in the workplace, like the #banbossy movement ironically started by Sandberg herself. 

She's not bossy, she's fired. Lol

— Shanley (@shanley) May 15, 2014

While conversations about the need for equal treatment of women in the workplace has been a hot topic lately, women in the media are still struggling professionally. In addition to the deeply entrenched systemic sexism faced by women in the tech industry, men still account for two-thirds of newsroom staff in media outlets and print publications.

Meanwhile, Baquet's appointment as Abramson's replacement could prove a much-needed boon to an industry that is still predominantly white. 

“It is an honor to be asked to lead the only newsroom in the country that is actually better than it was a generation ago," Baquet said about his appointment. 

But with Times staffers reeling from Abramson's departure, many may be questioning whether the newsroom was better than it was yesterday.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons 

If history has taught us anything about the Middle Ages, it's that the countless wars, the draconian class and gender divides, and the frequent bloodshed all lend themselves fabulously to a spot of singing and dancing. Monty Python, Mel Brooks, and Horrible Histories have all made it very clear that Medieval Land Fun-Time World is here to stay.

So we really shouldn't be too surprised that the recently fantasy-smitten ABC is debuting a new series, Galavant, that doesn't parade so much as gallop pell-mell through a throne room packed with medieval tropes: dancing knights, men in tights, and fair maidens.

Galavant is not even trying to pretend like it's not stealing its premise from The Princess Bride. For one thing, it starts with a genderbent Inigo Montoya showing up to goad a master swordsman into rescuing his one true love, who was kidnapped out of his arms in order to wed an evil king. At least it has the grace to cop to the theft in a line from one of its many Alan Menken-composed songs: "it's lots of plot, we know." Remove the comma, and you've got that right. 

But that's OK because no one is here for plot anyway: we're here for the blatant over-the-top antics of Timothy Ombudsman, fresh off his long run as Psych's Lassiter, and Karen David, whose role isn't exactly clear but who's fabulous anyway as she snarks about with Galavant, the new guy who looks like Fassbender: sanitized poolboy edition.

Ombudsman is clearly enjoying his new turn as the Prince Richard, who doesn't actually have six fingers on his right hand but makes up for it with a dose of cheerful evil administered via singing and dancing. We did mention the singing, right?

Galavant hails from the creator of the Crazy Stupid Love, another cliche-bender that proved ridiculously charming in spite of itself, though that was mostly because of the magic of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. Whether Galavant can charm us routinely on the small screen is another question. But for now, we're there with cap and bells on.

Screengrab via ABCNetwork/YouTube

As the much-anticipated Godzilla opens at the box office, it’s a good time to ask: Why is humanity so taken with the idea of invading lizards?

What if it’s because they’ve been among us all along?

For anyone familiar with wacky cults and conspiracy theories, the reptilian conspiracy may seem downright banal. But in truth, the belief that humanity has been living for thousands of years with a secret race of shape-shifting space alien lizards is less a conspiracy and more like a worldview—one an estimated 4 percent of Americans believe in. (Though we should note there is currently no way to gauge the percentage of Americans who answer poll questions ironically.)

When you open your eyes to the truth and realize that shape-shifting alien lizards, or reptilians, are among us, you realize that everything is connected. According to those who believe in the “Reptilian New World Order,” everything wrong with our world can be explained by the existence of evil overlord lizards who control their appearance by using high frequency vibrations to project holograms of humans from their liquid crystal skulls. These aliens have successfully infiltrated our world, albeit not without tireless opposition:

Photo via theluckydreamer/Tumblr

Reptoids have been blamed for everything from 9/11 to the disappearance of Flight 370 to causing homosexuality. Believers generally consign the storied existences of Freemasons and Illuminati to be the secret order of the reptoids, who have infiltrated their way into the higher echelons of human society and now virtually control every major social institution in the world, masquerading as kings and queens, political figures, and celebrities. Then again, the reptiloids also abduct and possess regular humans, so you could be a reptiloid yourself and never know it.

If you’re tied to a wealthy family with a long lineage, or if you find your route to success surprisingly easy, chances are you might be a reptile—or at least in league with one. Here is a list of our favorite reptilian overlords, to help keep you on your guard.

1) Barack Obama

Who: Our ruler.

Why: Racism, mainly—which is weird because most of the alien reptiles in power, as you’ll see from the remainder of the list, are white. But reptilian believers have gone to greatlengths to argue based on numerous “animal”-like physical traits, as well as his powerful status, that Obama is the scaliest reptilian of all.

Photo via Mactonnies

Also, he apparently has a suspiciously “rhythmic and musical” speech pattern. Then again, you already knew everyone on your high school debate team was an evil lizard.

2) Jack Nicholson

Who: A lizard, probably.

Why: Well, just look at him.

Screengrab via YouTube

3) Scooby Doo

Photo by Aja Romano

Who: Beloved Great Dane, leader of the Gang, preventer of dastardly criminals who otherwise would’ve gotten away with it

Why: According to his own series, Scooby Doo is actually descended from an ancient race of other-worldly Sumerian gods called the Annunaki, who communicated to their followers by taking the form of animals. But the Annunaki are also the same Mesopotamian deities who were actually early alien visitors, according to a popular theory started by new age philosopher Zecharia Sitchin. Sitchin mistranslated Sumerian in order to argue that the Annunaki visited earthlings from the planet Nibiru to interact with Sumerians at least 8,000 years ago. The truth, according to Sitchin, was out there. (Way, way out there.)

4)  Nikola Tesla

Who: Beloved inventor, sometime rival of Edison, and recent Internet icon

Why: Tesla was keenly interested in interstellar communication. Several times over his long and celebrated career, he expressed hope that he was on the trail of establishing communication with Mars. Like many scientists, he was certain that we could not be alone in the universe, and that the discovery of extraterrestrial life would create “the foundation for a universal brotherhood.” (So basically Tesla also invented Star Trek.)

But the connection with the reptoids really got started when Tesla’s long-time apprentice and assistant, Arthur Matthews, wrote a book 30 years after his death called The Wall of Light: Nikola Tesla and the Venusian space ship, the X-12.  In the book, which reads like a glorified fanfic about his former mentor, Matthews claimed that Tesla had always thought he was from Venus. Matthews claimed to have received visits from “Venusians” who took him to visit their home planet as well as Mars. The Venusians also told him that Tesla had been born on their space ship. Over the years, Matthews’ story has been used to argue that the Venusians were obviously the Sumerian reptile aliens, making Tesla one of them.

What do you think? Brilliant scientist ahead of his time, or futuristic space traveling reptile?

Photo via Serbian Transfers

5) Diazien Hossencofft

Photo via Murderpedia

Who: A former beloved member of Albuquerque homeopathic community, Diazien ran a fraudulent medical business peddling alternative treatment for cancer while claiming to have numerous fake doctorates.

That all changed when he was implicated in the murder of his ex-wife, Girly Chew Hossencofft, a Malaysian immigrant who had come to America to marry him. After years of domestic violence in which he threatened to kill her numerous times, Diazien became consumed with rage after Girly Chew divorced him. So he took the most logical route to dealing with her:

He convinced his new girlfriend, a woman named Linda Henning, that he was a rogue alien lizard working to expose other evil reptoids—and that Girly Chew was the biggest.

Henning was a UFO believer who once referred to herself as an “alien queen.” She also told a friend that when she and Diazien made love, they would transform into cat people. She’d only known Diazien six weeks before he convinced her to help him kill Girly Chew for the good of mankind.

Why: While Henning later claimed that reports of her reptoid zealotry were greatly exaggerated, Diazien Hossencofft gave chilling witness-stand testimony revealing himself to be either deeply disturbed or deeply committed to his evil lizard facade. At various points, he claimed to be an immortal alien from another planet, and stated that Girly Chew’s murder had just been “practice before the climax with the alien ‘New World Order.’”

Then again, he also told police he really just wanted her dead. A lot. We guess it’s all apples and oranges when you’re an immortal alien reptile.

6) Lorde

Photo via godlikeproductions

Who: Someone who’s secretly been a Royal all along.

Why: Lorde’s sudden rise to fame, high cheekbones, and older-than-her-years persona have sparked rampant speculation about her true reptilian identity.

I, for one, welcome our new reptilian overLorde.

7) Benedict Cumberbatch

Who: The beast of a thousand nicknames.

Why: According to the reptilian watch, the eyes don't lie. Is anyone really surprised?

Screengrab via YouTube

8) Sean Connery, George Lazenby, and Roger Moore

Illustration by Aja Romano

Who: Tile. Rep Tile.

Why: Though we couldn’t find any verification on this one, RationalWiki insists that David Icke, generally acknowledged to be the creator of the reptiloid philosophy, believes that the first three James Bonds are of the reptilian conspiracy. Given that Connery’s name is an anagram for “on every screen,” clearly this is all the evidence we need. Mostly, though, we’re just wondering why Timothy Dalton got a pass from alien inspection:

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

9) Angelina Jolie

Photo via davidicke.com

Who: Infamous man-stealer who uses her reptilian ways to work consistent magic at the box office.

Why: For years, Jolie’s edgy lifestyle has caused reptoid believers to cite her as one of the world’s most prominent reptilians. A recent outing in which Jolie appeared with white powder on her left cheek drew new alarm. Though it was probably just a highlighter mishap, alarmists attacked her for everything from sacrificing a goat to Satan in order to win Brad Pitt’s affections to trafficking drugs and sex for a secret society in exchange for a pristine public image.

Jolie’s Buddhist tattoo lends itself to the speculation: “May your enemies run far away from you. If you acquire riches, may they remain yours always. Your beauty will be that of Apsara. Wherever you may go, many will attend, serve and protect you, surrounding you on all sides.”

Angelina also voiced a creature in Beowulf where she appears sporting a full-length reptilian tail. And who’s about to appear as a shape-shifting dragon in the upcoming Maleficent, again?

In the words of “HeWhoKnows:” “Her father is bloodline. She is one of us.”

10) Anderson Cooper

Who:That dorky kid from Channel One.

Why: Does this really need explaining? He’s a Vanderbilt, one of the oldest reptilian families of all. But for those of you who still require proof, you’re in luck. The Internet can’tstoptalking about Cooper’s reptilian origins:

Screengrabs via YouTube

For those of you still in doubt about how to spot a shape-shifting reptile alien overlord, the Internet has plenty of guides to help you see the truth. (Spoiler: the truth mostly involves bad pixellation, which means that basically, the Internet is a giant lizard.) But be careful! Because the aliens are so good at their infiltration, you could be a lizard and not be aware of it.

If you start to notice yourself blinking sideways, growing scales, or breathing fire, you might be a lizard. However, if you haven’t been offered a position of extraordinary power lately, you’re probably one of the benevolent reptiloids who just want to be loved.

But if you think you might be slightly evil, fortunately for you, world power is within your grasp.

Illustration by Aja Romano

During this season of Supernatural, the weary travels of Team Free Will resembled nothing so much as True Detective: Time was a very flat circle.

“How many times have we been around this block?” Sam asks Dean in the latest episode. The answer is nine. Nine seasons of see-sawing character development, endless manpain, homoerotic subtext, and vanishing lessons learned from earlier seasons—themes that play out over the bodies of dead women, with jeering nods to SPN's worn-out fandom.

As we drive toward a 10th season that would tie SPN with Smallville for the CW’s longest-running show, Tuesday night’s season finale should feel exciting. Instead, it sags beneath the weight of fandom's growing expectations for a show that never existed.

GIF by Aja Romano

SPN's recent backdoor pilot episode for the potential spinoff “Bloodlines" should have been different. SPN is a road trip; “Bloodlines” had a contained radius. Supernatural follows demons and angels; “Bloodlines” featured underused creatures. SPN has only had three or four major recurring characters of color during its entire nine-season run, and has become notorious for axing women. One main "Bloodlines" character was black; another was female. Yet despite these flickers of promise, “Bloodlines” retread the same ground as every other episode of SPN, with cringe-worthy moments, heavy-handed drama, and awkward expository dialogue. 

Perhaps SPN's creative team felt these things wouldn't matter. After all, the show's fandom spent nearly a decade swooning over characters whose origins lie in angst, loss, and family tension, which “Bloodlines” copied by rote. But the episode received a roundly negative reaction from fans, and last week the CW announced that while it was still keenly interested in an SPN spinoff, “Bloodlines” was DOA.

To understand why “Bloodlines” failed is to understand how, over time, SPN has simultaneously cultivated and exhausted the hopes of fans. “Bloodlines” failed, above all, because it reminded fans how expendable their opinions are to the SPN creatives. It was less a new direction for the franchise than a simultaneous retread of ground no one wants to walk, and a painful reminder of everything the old show has yet to become.

Screengrab via Netflix

The Trouble With Sammy

From afar, SPN fandom seems divided into Destiel vs. Wincest, two queer ships the show has deliberately teased again and again. But the fault line is not really about ships, but about Sam Winchester (Jared Padalecki), and the way his character has become increasingly sidelined as Castiel (Misha Collin)’s role on the show has grown. 

Initially, Sam seemed like Supernatural’s hero. The pilot killed off both his mother and girlfriend and endowed him with a major identity crisis. Sam was the foil to his brother Dean (Jensen Ackles), who hid a rigid moral code behind an exaggerated dudebro facade dedicated to Things Manly Men Like: women, beer, classic rock, and cars—traits that made him the focal point of the fandom’s push for a queer pairing.  

From the beginning, Dean's private angst, his stoicism mixed with inner grief, his manly tears, held the narrative focus. SPN backed itself into a writer's corner with Sam: gentle characters don't generate drama. So Sam's actions became increasingly passive-aggressive, he became prone to getting taken over by dark forces, and the relationship between the brothers became increasingly dysfunctional. Their core conflict, Sam’s desire to leave the hunting business and Dean’s sense of betrayal, is just as unresolved now, in Season 9, as it ever was.

By the end of Season 8 it looked as though Dean might finally be willing to accept his brother’s choices for himself. Instead, Sam’s possession by Gadreel was a heavy-handed retread of earlier seasons, causing subsequent brotherly bonding moments to feel flat and superimposed instead of cathartic. Dean’s gutted, “There ain’t no me if there ain’t no you!” should have been as epiphanal for fans as his “I need you” to Cas was last season. Instead it played like one more rehashed trust issue to add to Sam and Dean's game of dysfunctional Jenga. 

GIF via supernatural-crowley-thekingofhell

But in Supernatural, love seems less like intimacy between characters who evolve together and more like a series of increasingly meaningless grand gestures on a show so bloated with drama that it obscures character development. SPN insists the brothers love each other, but what the brothers do suggests they know each other less than ever. These days, neither acknowledges Sam's own period of addiction, or Dean's decade as hell's torture master. With so little effort made to explore Sam's character and provide continuous character development this season, fans are eager for the finale to make amends.

But there's a major reason that might not happen, and it has wings.

Photo via girlslovesarcasm

Earth Angel

More Castiel shouldn't mean less Sam, but historically, it has. Castiel’s character has developed more consistently between Seasons 4-5 and 8-9 than anything else on SPN, but as his popularity grew, less attention went to Sam. After Castiel's unsatisfying “death” and bizarre character detour during Season 7, SPN’s viewership plunged so dramatically that showrunner Sera Gamble left and Misha Collins returned as a series regular, bringing with him the highest ratings the show had seen in years, and setting the stage for the new era of Supernatural fandom on Tumblr.

In 2013, Supernatural was the most reblogged TV show on Tumblr, and Ackles, Padalecki, and Collins were in the top five most-reblogged actors. Part of that popularity comes from Superwholock; but another huge factor is the fanbase's support for a romantic relationship between Dean and Castiel.

GIFs via mary-winchesteer

On Tumblr, a tantalizing male/male OTP is the best possible currency a show can have to barter for an audience. For a show in its ninth season to actually see its ratings increase is almost unheard of. But Destiel is a perpetual motion machine, drawing more people into the fandom and investing them in the show—specifically, in Destiel becoming canon.

Destiel shippers believe their ship's “profound bond” is “endgame," a relationship five seasons in development, ready to blossom into romance any day. The show eggs shippers on through frequent sly winks to the pairing, encouraging the tiny possibility that Destiel could become canon—a possibility fans have magnified until the ship's shadow looms large over the show.

There’s just one problem: Destiel is a constellation away from the narrative of Supernatural.

Photo via Cracked

A Wasteland of Dead Girls and Testosterone

In Supernatural the only permanent bonds are masculine. The only thing higher than SPN’s female body count is the number of white men on the show. Women further the angst of the male characters. At least twice, SPN has taken female characters who’ve already been killed off and resurrected them in an alternate timeline, only to kill them again solely to provoke more manpain. At one point this season, Linda Tran makes a welcome appearance, only to declare that her priority is being a good mother to her son—who is dead.  

Sam, Dean, and Cas are lost and parentless, with no idea how to express intimacy, because intimacy in SPN is feminine, and all the women they know are dead. Dean's heteronormativity is so rigid it's taken years for him to express how he feels to Sam or Cas in moments when the stakes aren’t life and death. Castiel has spent the last two seasons learning how to hug people. The theme of Crowley’s current addiction to human blood is his inability to deal with emotion.  “I’ll cheer the day when the last trace of humanity leaves me,” he says in a recent episode “FEELINGS!”

GIF via sevendeanlysins

SPN's final Big Bad has always been the threat that real male intimacy poses to its proto-masculine image of itself. It’s a fight of continual repression and internalized shame, waged in sideswipes, gay jokes, and incessant shaming of effeminacy, nerdiness, and anything that might resemble nuanced expressions of male gender. Narratively, out of nine seasons, SPN has only had five canonically gay characters with a 50% survival rate. And “dorky guys” including Castiel are consistently made fodder for Dean’s and the show's amusement, not admiration or attraction.

Photo via reiko-jason

But the more SPN mocks and represses, the more it has to contend with its own fandom—female, queer, genderqueer, nerdy, and unashamed. The fandom's culling of queer and genderqueer readings from SPN deliberately repudiates its textual scouring of their own identities and emotional landscapes.

SPN’s fandom is diametrically opposed to the straightlaced mainstream audience SPN wishes it had. So SPN’s creative team routinely breaks the fourth wall in the most passive-aggressive way: to remind fans that they see you and they disapprove.

Photo via hysteriabannon/Tumblr

Carry on, wayward fans 

Supernatural is notorious for fan-shaming, especially male nerds and female fanfic writers. In the latest episode, Metatron is labeled “a nerd trying to be one of the popular kids.” Metatron's arc is an allegorical punishment of fanfic writers, with attendant assumptions about their misguided entitlement. “We are writing our own epic story,” he says as he disrupts the natural order of heaven.

Felicia Day’s Charlie is SPN's ambassador for the positive aspects of geek culture. But her “positive” space is gaming and roleplay, which have traditionally been seen as the purview of male nerds—some of whom have fought hard to exclude women unless they happen to be, well, Felicia Day.

GIF via xsapphirecloudx

And while Charlie is a step forward for queer, nerdy fangirls, this season found her being shamed for loving stories, in an episode where she's instructed to abandon her own ideas about her favorite story and accept a different reality.

In Supernatural's reality, geeks are losers unless the thing they’re being nerdy about, like Charlie's gaming, Sam's research, or Dean's cars, is sanctioned by male culture. And since geek culture is also a natural home for alternative gender and sexual identities, when SPN shames the former, it's implicitly shaming the latter. 

The result is a snake eternally eating its own tail. SPN builds its homoerotic subtext into the narrative, using traditionally romantic plot tropes to advance its brotherly bonds...

GIF via kindly-hers

...then lays waste to that subtext by turning queer male sexuality into an awkward punchline.

GIF via supernatural-crowley-kingofhell

When fandom responds sincerely to that subtext, the show lashes out with derision and amusement at their geeky audience for thinking their show is anything but a straight dudebro fest. When Supernatural kills off its women, fandom responds by celebrating them and making as much noise about it as possible, in hopes that the creative team will move the narrative along a progressive trajectory.

They Were Expendable

Season 9 has already sabotaged possibilities for more interesting narratives, particularly by offing two of its best characters without even a climax:

GIF via fucking-castiel

Kevin (Osric Chau) was a recent addition to the SPN Family, and one of the few things the SPN fandom could agree on. Brilliant, snarky, and cursed with a gift he never asked for, he had more potential for growth than any character since Castiel. Instead, his narrative development floundered, and midway through the season, he was killed off—on his birthday, no less—in a particularly wasteful way. 

Abaddon was set up to be one of the season’s biggest threats. But in her final episode, she spent more time facilitating family bonding time between Crowley and his long-lost son than she did fighting, and when she finally got busy she never stood a chance.

GIF via idjitsintheimpala

Recently characters like Jody Mills have had promising character development. But given SPN's inconsistent track record and its willingness to waste the great characters it's already got, it's difficult to hope for more.

Still, SPN's long strategy of "tease and deny" is good at generating hope. It's practically running on the fumes of fan enthusiasm, or should we say Fangasm. At best, Season 9's backhanded reminders that the fans are negligable seem ill-considered.

The real mystery of the Season 9 finale is not Sam, Destiel, or Dean, but rather: Is the show finally listening to its fans? For a series steeped in meta statements, intentional teasing, and occasionally direct messages across the fourth wall to fandom, SPN seems incredibly quick to shut out fannish input. 

But SPN couldn't do that when it came to "Bloodlines."

“Bloodlines” failed in its first five minutes, when a character sees his girlfriend die in front of him. Of all the things "Bloodlines" could have culled from the SPN pilot, the SPN writers chose to mirror the horrible opening sequence, fridging a female character in order to imbue the surviving male character with angst. Around and around the devil's trap we go. 

GIF via sweetpotateos

In a recent interview, Jensen Ackles noted that he felt the Supernatural pilot, in which two women are killed off in the space of an episode in order to fuel the brothers' angst, would be greenlit today.

But in 2014, SPN's female-dominated fandom doesn't have to accept such a weak, misogynistic premise. And when it was time for fandom to stand up and be heard, SPN's systematic exclusion of those female fans proved its undoing—especially because if it had been listening to its fans, it wouldn't have written such a shitty plot point in the first place.

Fandom’s hopes for the finale are incredibly high and its expectations are incredibly low. By the end of the penultimate episode of Season 9, a minor recurring character gives a speech about the repetitive horror and endless tedium of the life she’s been living out ever since her fall from heaven. Then she commits seppuku.

Perhaps that’s the most unwittingly meta statement of all.

Photo via Es/Wikimedia Commons

After four centuries, you might think that all of Shakespeare's tricks have been revealed. After all, as many times as the bard has been re-imagined and re-intepreted, what else can there possibly be left to add?

Plenty, as it turns out—or so Boston audiences are learning in an astounding new production of The Tempest that incorporates magic from Teller (the silent half of Penn & Teller), music from Tom Waits, and monsters from the "zombie choreographer" of The Walking Dead.

The central character of The Tempest is Prospero (Tom Nelis), an exiled duke who is shipwrecked on a strange Mediterranean island with his daughter Miranda. He becomes a powerful sorceror, ruler of all the elements—except for the most uncontrollable one of all, the human heart.  

According to Posner, the production is a dream realized for Teller. "He has been thinking about this play and living with this play for 30 or 40 years," he said, "loving it, caring about it, dreaming about when he could bring it to the stage."

For the new production, Teller and Las Vegas illusionist Johnny Thompson designed and staged Prospero's magic as Shakespeare intended it to be, one of the show's dramatic elements rather than a superimposed trick. The 80-year-old Thompson told Boston's WBUR that the experience of working on a Shakespeare play after years of doing Las Vegas magic tricks was "wonderful."

The production is co-directed by Teller and Aaron Posner and began as a big-tent production in Symphony Park, Las Vegas, before moving to Boston for a stint at Harvard's American Repertory Theatre.

In addition to the magical effects, which are dictated by Shakespeare himself, the production has enlisted theatrical dance troupe Pilobolus, a double-jointed crew, whose Associate Artistic Director Matt Kent has done zombie choreography for The Walking Dead. The dancers make up the island's many strange and weird monsters, led by the monster Caliban, played in this production as a two-headed conjoined beast. The fairy Ariel (Nate Dendy) is another trickster, joining Prospero in directing the play's onstage illusions as if they are regular magicians rather than actors.

Photo via American Repertory Theatre

The overall effect is mixed—the Las Vegas Suncalled it"mind-blowing" while the LA Timesfelt the production was overblown and noisy, noting, "[T]his roaring storm has no eye."

But it's clear that for the cast and crew, the production arises from deeply held passions for the stage, Shakespeare, and the combination of elements that Prospero's island brings together: theatre, dance, and magic. 

"I feel like I am a kid in the greatest candy store that has ever been created for anyone," Posner said.

It's a candy store that will most likely be headed to Broadway after its Boston run, and possibly a stop in California.

Theatre lovers, put on your raincoats.

Photo via American Repertory Theatre

Filming for Star Wars: Episode VII, i.e. the most-anticipated film since ever, has begun, and early photos are already making their way from the sound stage to the Internet.

Now, J.J. Abrams' opening-day note to his cast and crew has surfaced, revealing not just an awareness of the intergalactic size of the task they have set before them, but also his knowledge that the whole world is watching:

"Dearest Cast and Crew," the note reads:

What an honor it is to work beside all of you, on Star Wars Ep VII. I can’t thank you enough, for all work past and future. Let’s take good care of not just ourselves, but of each other. Amazing, but true: the world awaits this film. Let’s give ‘em something GREAT.

xo JJ  

Abrams is leaving one troubled starship in his wake as he exits the Star Trek franchise to helm another beloved sci-fi franchise in a galaxy far, far away. But that hasn't stopped fan enthusiasm for the film from gaining steam as details about the cast have surfaced, some from surprising places. 

So will Abrams' farewell note on the final day of production be as rosy and optimistic? We can only hope so.

May the force of a beloved industry-smashing, Disney-backed, high-budgeted Hollywood production be with you.

Photo by JD Hancock

As any creator knows, it takes a formidable amount of discipline to try to create something new every single day—but the rewards can last much longer than the moment.

Now, one deviantART creator is sharing his 365-day art project with the rest of the community, and the results are a reminder that passion can transform even the most trivial medium, and inspire even the most casual artist.

Gabriel Picolo's mesmerizing pen-and-ink doodles, which he's been sketching into his Moleskines every day since January, are less casual sketches and more like a series of "mindful meditations" captured in art form. The Brazilian graphic design student told deviantART-based journal depthRADIUS that he started the project "to fight procrastination and stop being such a lazy artist." So far the results have been anything but lazy. Picolo uses a multi-step drawing technique to achieve the beauty and luminous quality of the work he shares with the world. He starts with a pencil sketch, then does an elegant inking with Staedtler black ink, using a white paint as a corrector. Finally, he scans in his drawings and digitally enhances the color and contrast.

The product is a world of beautiful black-and-white drawings that call to mind the best of children's literature, Ghibli animation, and the wonders of the imagination. Here are some of our favorite of Picolo's doodles so far.

Day 1: You're Scarier Than You Think

Day 4: Thin rain

Day 19: Show me your true color

Day 25: I am the city

Day 26: Alice in Doodleland

Day 40: Milkshake

Day 57: Ray of Hope

Day 64: Ashes

Day 86: Departure of the Winged Ships

Day 98: After the rain

Day 118: Searching for the moon

Day 124:  Happy Bday Audrey Hepburn

Day 132: Red Riding Hood

Picola says that he prefers to doodle in the evening and draw inspiration from his day.

From the looks of things, he's having a very good year.

Illustration by Gabriel Picola via 365-daysofdoodles/deviantART

Fanwork may still be a controversial subject among creatives and producers, but one franchise has fully embraced the creative outpouring of its fandom. Teen Wolf made history by hosting one of the first slash-friendly fanfiction contests sanctioned by a corporation, in this case MTV. But they also love fanart, and have been open about having prints of selected works of fanart for the show collected on their own walls.

When the post-production team of MTV's hit Teen Wolf made a home on Tumblr last fall, they were inundated with questions from the fandom about their famous fanart gallery.  In November, they had a mini-art show and invited the cast and crew of the show to pop by, including titular teen wolf Tyler Posey.

Now, the post-production Tumblr has finished shining the spotlight on each of the first 16 pieces of fanart that the crew chose to hang in the Teen Wolf crew's unofficial gallery. The project started in January with the first piece of fanart they selected, and featured a new piece of fanart each week on "Moonday"—the day Teen Wolf airs.

In addition to simply revealing the pieces they'd chosen, the crew enlisted various cast members to help them out with photoshoots done in tribute to the artwork.

They even included a piece of Sterek fanart. It's a Red Riding Hood tribute that's a popular recurring theme among Sterek fanartists. To illustrate it, they enlisted none other than heartthrob Dylan O'Brien himself, who plays Stiles, one half of the tremendously popular pairing.

"Every piece we have in our gallery is fantastic and fascinating for its own reason," they wrote. Like any proper art gallery, the Teen Wolf gallery treats its collection as legitimate art pieces: each piece features the name of the artist, the title of the work, and the medium and year of its creation.

After an intense curation process, scouring Tumblr, DeviantArt and the like, we collectively agreed on our favorites.  We contacted the artists, printed the pieces, and hung them in our common space, now called “the gallery.”

Later, they elaborated:

[I]t wasn’t so much a submission process as it was a selection process. We did this for ourselves originally, (we were tired of looking at bare walls), but realized it was a great way to simultaneously honor the fans and artists out there.  The pieces we selected were ones that we just really liked!  We had a ton of options that we loved, but democracy ruled.  We voted on our favorites and those were the ones we ended up hanging. 

Photo via teenwolfpostproduction/Tumblr

The project was the brainchild of TW editor Gabriel Fleming. who curated the gallery. The Tumblr shares the crew's thoughts on the artwork they chose, like a piece by Emily (perseused) entitled, "i ask not for a lighter burden but for broader shoulders."

"Firstly, we have heard so many compliments on the title! Everyone loves it and all that it represents, especially with these three," the production team wrote. Posey, O'Brien, and Crystal Reed, who plays Allison, each chimed in to illustrate the work.

The original 16 pieces selected for the gallery concluded yesterday with a guest appearance from Tyler Hoechlin, and a hilarious piece illustrating a fake Penguin cover mocking his character Derek's terrible relationship history:

Photo via teenwolfpostproduction/Tumblr

In addition to showcasing amazing works of art from the TW fandom, the gallery clearly serves another purpose: building a bond between the franchise and its fans, while representing fanwork positively to the rest of the world. But there's another byproduct of the gallery. It inspires the production team as much as the rest of us. As the Tumblr's creator wrote:

In the chaos of finishing 3B, a crew member came up to me and gave me a hug thanking me for helping to organize this. Tired and looking at another long day, he told me that seeing all of the fanart reminded him why he did this. For all of you dedicated fans who have, you yourselves, devoted so much time to Teen Wolf. 

You can view the entire collection on the TW crew's Tumblr.

Photo via teenwolf/Tumblr

If you've ever been in a fandom, you know that marathoning your favorite TV shows is a fine art. For a community eager to stay well-versed on the latest in pop culture, consuming media as quickly as possible is a common tactic for geeks on the go. Sometimes you have to prioritize which episodes will get your attention. 

Now, a new Tumblr, Skippable, is taking out the guesswork for new fans. Need to convince your new Whovian friend that you're an expert on the Tennant years? Skippable has your back, and it also has a quick summary of what you're missing.

The Tumblr is the brainchild of Anthony Burch, better known as the brotherly half of gaming parody web series Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'. On his Twitter, Burch noted the Tumblr is meant to serve as more of a quick wiki than a blog. He also said he was looking for submissions, so anyone out there with an encyclopedic knowledge of your favorite TV series, now is your chance to shine.

Since the Tumblr launched on Saturday, Burch has released skippable cheat sheets for 12 shows, including all of the Whedon-verse and the two "halves" of Doctor Who. Burch prioritizes episodes that help you understand the show's continuity, as you can see from a quick glance at his skippable guide to Buffy, which eschews almost any episode that prominently features Xander, and advises you to skip fan favorites like "Superstar" and "Tabula Rasa," while noting that they're among of the series' best standalones. Sadly, Skippable has no advice for fans who'd rather watch "Superstar" 20 times in a row than subject themselves to Season 4's Riley arc.

As for how the blog will deal with more exhaustive filler, that remains to be seen. Perhaps Skippable will advise newcomers to skip the entirety of Naruto's pointless pre-Shippuden filler arc, or all of Supernatural's countless monster-of-the-week stories. Hey, it's all in the service of getting to the good stuff. 

And we'll go ahead and call it: Someone should probably make a fandom-friendly version of Skippable called Shippable, one that hones in on every scene you need to watch in order to get your fill of your preferred OTP gazing doofily at each other—after all, Tumblr GIFs can only take you so far.

The best part of Skippable is that it doesn't espouse the idea that you have to slog through the bad parts, like, oh, all of the Logan era of Gilmore Girls, or that truncated season Bones fans don't talk about, and really what is even the point of a post-Downey Ally McBeal, in order to call yourself a true fan. 

And that means that we can all get that much geekier, that much faster than before.

Illustration via dangergraphics/Flickr

The finale of Supernatural Season 9 aired last night, along with a bombshell that will keep fans on tenterhooks until Season 10 airs in the fall. But in the meantime, a new fan project will hopefully help them ride out the wait: Supernatural: the Fanimation, or SPNF for short. The project—to produce a fan-made animated, alternate version of Season 9—is ambitious.

But together with a recently launched project to make a fan-animated production of Attack on Titan, it's part of a growing trend of fans taking their creative talents and putting them to use making alternate versions of the things they love.

Alternate "seasons" of fandoms are nothing new. Supernatural: Redemption Road is a well-known alternate Season 7 written by members of the SPN fandom in an episodic format. Fan-made animated videos are likewise nothing new, though usually they're short clips, like one recent popular fanimation featuring Batman and the Terminator. Combining the two is an idea that has become more common recently. A project started last year by the Homestuck fandom eventually went in the direction of an entirely original production, but it set the wheels in motion for more like it.

SPNF is the brainchild of SPN fans John Cohen, a 19-year-old Canadian, and Daniel LaLiberty, a 17-year-old from Wisconsin. Daniel says that their project "started out as a wistful joke," the next-best thing this side of kidnapping the actors and having them roleplay new scenes, particularly since Jared Padalecki is too tall to fit in anyone's trunk. The two brought on production manager May Sage-Chiasson and began working on ideas for streamlining and improving the rocky, controversial Season 9 with outlines of all new episodes. From there, the call went out to fans on the project's official Tumblr:

Are you unsatisfied with Season 9?

Do you have a background in animation?

Do you spend a lot of time in your room imitating the voices of 30-something-year-old men?

So how does SPNF propose to re-work Season 9? According to Daniel, the fan animation will "tweak poor characterization, revamp the lore to how it was in earlier seasons, and hook together fan ideas that are very popular." They plan to include novelty episodes like a musical, and account for the much-criticized way that "women are killed off after 30 seconds of screen time." They also want to include a "wider representation of the LGBTQI+ community and more ethnically and culturally diverse peoples."

The goals of the Attack on Titan (SnK) fan animation project, which got off the ground a few weeks after SPN's, are similar: produce a gripping Season 2 that will tide fans over until the real thing. The SnK fanimation project comes from a fan named Elizabeth, a self-described college freshman who "loves acting, directing, writing, and a good story." She and her friend Alex, who shares her interests in directing and acting, decided to tackle it after the SPN fanimation project inspired them to do something similar:

I got wind of [the SPN fanimation project] and was really interested by it because I love to act, direct and write, but had never been able to really get a good idea down. I turned to my close friend Alex, because while I knew I wanted to do a fanimation, I wasn't sure what, and Alex suggested we do something based off of Attack on Titan, because we'd both recently gotten into the fandom and were really excited for the next season (which we discovered wasn't going to be released for a few years). That was when we decided we would make the project about SNK—we wanted to give fans something to keep them going while they waited for the real thing.

So far, the SnK fanimation project has a casting director and is accepting applications from fans to join their crew. They're particularly in need of animators, voice actors, sound effects staff, and script writers. The character listing is available here, and all voice auditions can be sent directly to snkfanimation@gmail.com. Elizabeth and Alex note that they welcome applications as well as questions and feedback of all kinds.

Meanwhile, the SPNF crew has ballooned: in addition to the impressive cast and production team already assembled, the project's Tumblr has grown by thousands of followers. You can find out how to join the SPNF production team here on their submission page.

Daniel says he hopes the project will move some members of his team along a professional career trajectory. "One of our animators is hoping to go to college for animation, and several of our scriptwriters are looking to be professionals somewhere in the literature community."  In fact, some of the SPN team already are pros, including professional voice actor Tajja Isen, and professional production assistant Jennifer L. Anderson.

The main delay in production for both projects is one that will doubtless be the biggest hurdle for all similar projects to overcome—the hunt for talented fanartists with the ability and time to serve as animators. SPNF is hoping to release an episode by early September, while SnKF hopes to get off the ground soon. In the meantime, the two projects are working together. Daniel notes that he's helped the SnK group with coding and general advice.

While both projects note that they don't feel what they're doing falls into the category of "fanfiction," the goal of "aiming to stick as close as we can to the main plotlines of the season while still realistically fixing things" is precisely what fanfiction does best. 

And as the two projects show, collaborative creativity is something fandom does better than any other game in town.

Photo via xshadow-lightx/deviantART

For a brief moment earlier this year, LiveJournal, the early blogging community that paved the way for modern social media platforms, was stunningly relevant in the U.S. once again. A member of its enormous Eastern European audience was posting breathtaking photos of the Kiev revolution, and those of us who hadn't logged into our LJ accounts in years—except to occasionally prevent it from deleting one of our old accounts—were reminded of the vibrant community we lost.

The days of LiveJournal's thriving English-language community aren't that far behind us. Just a few years ago, any update LJ made would incur a flood of feedback on its main news account. As late as 2012, before LJ all but abandoned its U.S. offices, the LJ community was still desperate to keep the site from evolving away from the Internet hometown we loved.

Last week, however, as LJ rolled out a major overhaul of its UI without any fanfare or English-facing public announcement, it seemed there was no one left even to complain. Apart from a few angry comments on an older news post demanding to know why LJ didn't even bother to prepare users for the change, the change has barely elicited more than a shrug from LJ's once passionately-invested community of users.

LiveJournal's most recent rollout significantly lightens the text and background color while widening the default layout and hiding many of the icons and navigational cues throughout the site. Here's how the LiveJournal home page looked last Wednesday...

...and how it looked after the update:

While it's admittedly a cleaner, more mobile-friendly look, the redesign unfortunately hides important parts of the navigation. Most of the main navigational tools, which used to be in the main navbar, are scattered all over the place:

• The logout function is now tucked away under the dropdown menu under "my blog."
• The friends view is still on the main navigation—but that means you can't see it from the main LiveJournal.com page. You can only get to it from going to "my blog" and then chosing your profile from the dropdown menu, clicking on it, going to your profile page, and then clicking "Friends Feed." Seriously.
• Meanwhile, your own blog is not available from the main menu on your profile. To see it you need to click the words "My Blog" or your username from the drop-down menu.
• A few tools are now inexplicably accessible only through the new "Statistics" sidebar, which is otherwise functionally useless unless you really like seeing your comment count go up from all those readers you no longer have because they left LJ for Tumblr two years ago. These include your access to Memories (LJ's antiquated but hefty system for bookmarking old posts), Photos, and Userpics.

The new design also, somewhat perplexingly, makes "Social Capital"—a mysterious popularity ranking system based on what seems to be overall level of popularity combined with recent activity—the most prominent thing about any LJ user's profile. Brad Fitzpatrick, LJ's creator, is probably the oldest, and by far one of the most popular users on the site. But because his last actual post was made in 2012, he has a social capital of "less than 10," whatever that means.

Although the "social capital" function has been around for a while, its new prominence ironically highlights LJ's absent community (at least for those who've chosen not to opt-out of it; everything LiveJournal does is opt-out rather than opt-in these days.) Once-thriving accounts like Brad's sit dormant and inactive. The "less than 10" isn't really about social capital; it's about the steady decline and forced diaspora of LJ's userbase. Its once diverse community, particularly welcoming to fandom, is silent, most having relocated to Tumblr, while LJ's only arguably mainstream community, popular gossip site Oh No They Didn't, now draws the bulk of participation and activity for the entire English-language portion of the website.

Other once-central communities have steadily been driven away by LiveJournal's own changing culture. The former staple community Fandom Secrets announced its departure to the warmer fandom-friendly climate of LJ clone Dreamwidth in 2012. Other major parts of the LJ community like Crack Van eventually followed. 

When LJ's parent company SUP merged with Russian media conglomerate Rambler last year without any attention from the English portion of the website, it seemed to solidify the increasingly silent divide between the website's cultural community. Site support seems to have suffered in the process. Earlier this month one of the last major bastions of fandom anonymous meme culture, Failfandom_anon, said goodbye and moved to Dreamwidth after its members spent weeks unable to use the site. LJ's code testing, presumably in anticipation of this new design rollout, was crippling the server on which the community was located.

But despite the weeks of testing, the new update has severely limited functionality. Despite numerous attempts, I was unable to get the Friends page to load by clicking on it directly, both in Chrome or Firefox. Forcing the page to open in a new tab using the Control/Apple key or right-click function was successful, but this trick might be beyond the technical knowledge of many users.

Not only that, but a question from the aptly-named LJ user forcryinoutloud about how to revert back to the old interface returned this bizarre response from LJ's skeleton crew support team, as relayed by another LJ user, infinitepryde:

If you go to the Livejournal homepage and look at the top bar in the new UI, you should be able to click on the (blank?) space between "Post in blog" and the message icon. This should give you a menu that includes the option to revert.

Incredibly, it's true. There's an invisible easter egg link to the Support contact form lurking hidden in the top right corner of the LJ menu. Visiting the link directly won't help, but if you click on the space at the top right corner, it activates the new "welcome" button, shown above, instead of the link. This gives you the option to switch back to the old UI:

Speaking to the Daily Dot by email, LiveJournal's newly-appointed CEO Katya Akudovich noted that the recent release is a beta version. She also said that the new rollout was just the beginning:

We value opinions of users tremendously and really want to get as much feedback as possible. 

Users will be able to switch back to the old design in the next two weeks.   On June 1st, after responding to all the feedback and possible adding/fixing certain things, we will roll out final version. 

We will also roll out our beautiful and easy to use Android app. 

 

On June 15th we will roll out iOS version.

While LJ users seemed to appreciate the aesthetic changes to the design, the decrease in functionality and the lack of transparency was a source of frustration.  Longtime LJ user Sam Starbuck, who is currently one of the site's active power users, stated that he wasn't sure catering to the dwindling English-language audience was a priority for the site—and wasn't sure it mattered anyway.

I don't think a new look with the same functionality is going to get them anywhere. It seems like the reason people made the jump [from LJ to Tumblr] is that the most commonly-used functions (posting images, sharing other peoples' content) is easier on Tumblr. 

It might be easy to assume that LiveJournal has joined its English users in consigning itself to the past—something so far removed from the emerging cultures of platforms like Tumblr, Wattpad, and Pinterest that it doesn't even try to compete. Then again, given Russia's harsh political climate, perhaps they simply have bigger problems. Ever since the tense 2011 Russian elections and Putin's return to power, blog sites including LJ and VK have experienced crippling, allegedly government-orchestrated denial of service attacks. They've also faced political takeovers, and, of course, the problems of maintaining stable Internet infrastructure during a revolution.

Nevertheless, Akudovich was confident, speaking of the beta stage as one of many changes to come: 

In general, this new design is only the first step in our renewal of the world's first social media network. While maintaining everything LiveJournal originally stood for, 2014 will mark a new chapter in our quest for ever-better functionality and usability. We will soon launch a lot of brand new services and the best mobile experience, making LJ a true dominant force in social media all over the world.

They have their work cut out for them. In January, when LJ user Ilya Varlamov went to the trouble of translating his Russian LJ post about the Ukraine uprising into English after realizing that U.S. and European media outlets were desperate for on-the-street information about what was happening in Kiev. The world seemed a bit smaller, and LiveJournal seemed one of the necessary bridges that kept it that way.

But after this rollout, it's hard not to wonder if that bridge is shakier than ever.

Disclosure: The reporter is a longtime LiveJournal user whose blog was featured in LiveJournal's 2007 10-year anniversary anthology as "an example of fandom at its best." She currently has a social capital of less than 10.

Illustration by Jason Reed

It's getting increasingly difficult for superhero fans to pry apart their issues with the beleaguered DC Comics from the film production team that's currently helming its limpest franchise.

But at least now they know what to call it when they're placing the blame. Yesterday Warner Bros revealed the highly anticipated title of the new Justice League movie—and it's just as lackluster as everything else you've come to expect from the franchise.

Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice is as anvilicious as everything else we've come to expect from the series of DC films that kicked off with Man of Steel. 

SUPERMAN/BATMAN EVENT FILM 2016 would have been a better and more honest title.

— Devin Faraci (@devincf) May 21, 2014

The choice seemed to receive universal bafflement from fans, who immediately devolved into making terrible legal and dishwashing soap jokes, in addition to debating the merits of putting Batman before Superman in the title. 

Triggered the emergency stop on my tube so I could tell the passengers about Dawn Of Justice. The driver said it was the right thing to do.

— Chris Hewitt (@ChrisHewitt) May 21, 2014

We're all just sitting now, staring at each other in stunned silence. One man in a suit and bike helmet has tears running down his cheeks.

— Chris Hewitt (@ChrisHewitt) May 21, 2014

Batman V Superman: Look We're Trying To Catch Up Here Cut The Shit Cut Us Some Slack We've Had Enough I'm Telling Mom

— Josh Wigler (@roundhoward) May 21, 2014

Though DC Comics is only loosely connected to the film franchise based off its two flagship superheroes, it's hard not to see this as par for the course. After all, this is the same legendary comics publisher so beleaguered in recent years for its terrible choices, ingrained sexism, inability to keep up with the more exuberant Marvel, and stubborn refusal to give fans a Wonder Woman movie that it now has its own watchdog site to keep track of its PR flubs and unpopular decisions.

That tarnished reputation also bleeds into the track record for the recent film franchise. Man of Steel drew mixed reviews from critics, and earlier this week, the series' screenwriter David Goyer came under fire for weirdly mischaracterizing Marvel's She-Hulk character as a male sex fantasy instead of a feminist icon designed to appeal to female comics fans.

Taken by itself, "Dawn of Justice" probably wouldn't have seemed like such a terrible title, but combined with the misgivings fans had about DC's haste to compete with Marvel and the choice of 300's director Zach Snyder to helm the franchise, it seems to indicate more of the same weighty self-importance that made Man of Steel only the 10th most successful superhero film .

And seriously: Dawn of Justice? Why not just call it "Look, we have to do this Justice League thing, but we don't have to like it." Not to mention the new logo looks like something you sketched on your Trapper Keeper in 6th grade.

Principle photography on Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice (see, once you start saying it, you can't not say the whole title—it's like the film title equivalent of a train wreck) began yesterday.

Photo via Facebook

Three days before she died, 7-year-old Angel Manliclic prevented her alleged killer—her own father—from committing suicide.

In exchange, he allegedly brutally stabbed his daughter to death and posted her photo on Facebook—all in order to provoke his estranged wife.

Mark Alvin Manliclic, a 31-year-old Filipino father, was apparently enraged that his wife had moved away and stopped communicating with him on Facebook. So when he got into an argument with her over the phone Tuesday, he allegedly took to Facebook to show her the proof of his anger: his savage murder of their daughter, Angel Mark Cathlene Manliclic.

Photo via Facebook

Quezon City police allege that Manliclic posted a brutal photo of the victim to Facebook in order to get his wife's attention—along with, some Facebook readers claimed, a horrifying video of the murder itself.

Screengrab via YouTube

Manliclic, who was jobless, allegedly grew incensed when his wife refused to return to the Philippines after going to Canada to work. News site ABS-CBN News reported that Manliclic's wife had left the country last May, and that she had not disclosed her plans to her husband for fear of her own life.

Filipino news site Tempo reported that he had previously threatened to kill his daughter if his wife did not return. After Manliclic confessed to the murder to his aunt, police found the body of the victim lying face down inside the house, where she had been killed as a result of multiple stab wounds in the neck, abdomen, and back. 

Police speculated that Manliclic might have been drunk at the time of the murder.

He was taken into custody and now faces parricide charges.

In response, Filipino Netizens have created a Facebook protest of their own—one calling for the maximum penalty for Manliclic. 

Photo via Facebook

In the annals of geek culture, the Marvel vs DC debate looms large, and while Marvel has undoubtedly been winning the PR war lately, for a moment back in 2011, DC seemed poised to make a mighty comeback with its launch of the New 52.

Featuring a wide range of all-new titles as well as major relaunches, the New 52 was, in theory, supposed to consist of 52 new titles that would revitalize the company and invigorate DC's fanbase. Instead, as DC mangled storylines and dropped titles right and left, the "52" ballooned and changed, and customer dissatisfaction grew over the way DC handled cancellations and dropped storylines.

Now, as Comics Alliance's Andrew Wheeler points out, the publisher stands dangerously close to having canceled 52 titles in its New 52 collection. Wheeler notes that since the lineup began, DC has averaged one final issue almost every three weeks.

One of the main problems with DC's new attempt to galvanize its readership is that its readership has evolved. Comics fandom is becoming larger and more diverse all the time, and DC doesn't seem able or willing to expand the diversity of its own lineup accordingly. Where Marvel has shown a willingness to listen to its fans regarding everything from increasing diversity to giving female superheroes real costumes and their own TV series, DC has seemed consistently out of step with the times.

In the past few months alone it's alienated readers by issuing blatantly tone deaf covers that objectify women, punctuating Black History month by whitewashing a few of its characters from pre-New 52 titles, and, of course, refusing to give fans a Wonder Woman movie.

Another factor is that DC seems indifferent to how storylines in its New 52 series are concluded, delaying titles, abruptly canceling series, and in some cases even releasing them out of order despite how confusing this must be to readers.

DC also has had unlucky PR fiascos recently, including mixing up Green Arrow and Green Lantern in its own licensing. No wonder DC thinks a Wonder Woman movie would be too "tricky" to update.

Wheeler points out that DC has been trying to give progressive titles a chance, stories like Birds of Prey and Batwing, its last solo title led by a character of color.  But the former title suffered from being separated from its original writer and lead character, Gail Simone and Barbara Gordon, while the second title never managed to find its audience. Wheeler speculates that this is because of DC's "monolithic" style and the kinds of storytelling that make it difficult to engage new readers.

Its low number of women writers and publisher Dan Didio's infamous "who should we be hiring?" defense at the 2011 Comic Con probably didn't help either—though DC has since increased the number of women writers on staff from one to four for its upcoming batch of releases.

But it's also worth noting that DC, particularly with its groundbreaking '80s masterworks like Swamp Thing, Dark Knight Returns, and its entire Vertigo imprint, has an esteemed and important history of embracing comics that are dark, full of social commentary, and narratively risky, while pinning its success on its two most famous icons, Batman and Superman. It's a strategy that led to DC taking the prize for 6 of the top 10 bestselling comic issues in the first decade of the millennium.

But the new mass of mainstream audiences are eager for excitement, action, and talking raccoons. In its haste to incorporate this new readership, DC seems to be warring with the eternal question of how to engage new readers with new titles while still staying true to its core fanbase, and the spirit that makes DC unique.

Given the constant and dizzying rotation of dropped and new titles, DC seems to be throwing things at audiences to see what sticks. Currently, the only thing that seems clear is that audiences want more Batman and more Justice League. But New 52's Batfamily is one without Cassandra Cain, the first member of color, and the current Justice League has a Wonder Woman that's a glorified extra. Meanwhile, other progressive titles like Blue Beetle got the axe long ago.

And, of course, there's the simple factor that fans who invested in early New 52 titles only to see them unceremoniously dropped will be wary of picking up new titles for fear those titles, too, might suffer the same fate.

In August, the New 52 line will be three years old. But unless it can figure out a way to diversify and bring new fans on board without mowing down its lineup, the Marvel fandom's "on your left, DC" meme will continue to work against it.

Hopefully, DC can get its act together before it celebrates the New 52 anniversary by canceling New 52 altogether.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Friends, we live in a golden age, an age where superheroes not only go on vacation together, but take selfies and share them with the rest of us on social media.

It's been just over a month since Mark Ruffalo convinced Avengers co-star Robert Downey Jr. to join Twitter, and soon Downey Jr. was tweeting selfies of the two besties like a pro.

Now we're hopeful that the green half of our Bruce Banner/Tony Stark "Science Bros" OTP will convince Downey Jr. to follow him to Tumblr and Instagram and Facebook, where he's posting selfies of the two of them enjoying their Memorial Day weekend together. 

Downey already has an Instagram, but alas, it stands empty and deserted. His Facebook account is a sadly selfie-less land of memes and the kind of in-jokes that abound when you're one of the most famous humans on the planet. But knowing how much our favorite red-suited titanium superhero loves selfies, we're guessing that will change soon. It seems Ruffalo is influencing him for the better.

I mean, hey, they're already clothes-swapping:

"Glasses swapping is as wild as we get these days," Ruffalo wrote. "Happy swapping on Memorial Day weekend with Mark and Bob."

Meanwhile, on Twitter, Downey countered with the "Before" of the cute couple's before and after segment:

"Safety first this Memorial Day weekend," Downey tweeted. "Strap in with Mark and Bob! "

Okay, we know that Downey Jr. has the sparkly ability to turn everyone he works with into his best friend, but really, what these two have is special. 

Thanks, guys, for kicking our Memorial Day weekend off to a great start.

Photo via Instagram

Eager J.K. Rowling fans, don't expect to pre-order your copy of her next Cormoran Strike novel any time soon—at least not from Amazon.

The Silkworm, the second novel from her mystery nom de plume Robert Galbraith, isn't out until June, but Amazon's pre-order service for it is currently unavailable, all because Amazon appears to be trying its best to blatantly strongarm Rowling's publisher, Hachette Book Group, into complying with its contractual demands.

Another title, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, is a detailed and eye-opening account of Amazon's ruthless business practices and the effect they have on the day-to-day culture of the company. It is not, however, currently available on Amazon in paperback. 

Hachette is a major publisher whose authors range from J.D. Salinger to J.K. Rowling and James Patterson. Earlier this month, Hachette accused Amazon of delaying shipments of books and claiming that Hachette titles were "out of stock" despite having plenty of the books in their warehouses. On its website and in a statement given to the New York Times, Hachette reiterated that its books were readily available:

"We are satisfying all Amazon’s orders promptly, and notifying them constantly of forthcoming publicity events and of out-of-stock situations on their website. Amazon is holding minimal stock and restocking some of HBG's books slowly, causing “available 2-4 weeks” messages, for reasons of their own. . . .

HBG’s titles are widely and immediately available on barnesandnoble.com, powells.com, booksamillion.com, and in thousands of great chain and independent bookstores across the country."

The Times listed the reason for the dispute as Amazon seeking "better terms," but "better" for Amazon is rarely better for the publishing industry. During Amazon's 17-year history, it has grown notorious for bullying publishers into capitulating to its industry-squeezing marketing tactics, including but not limited to: demanding price cuts and higher percentages, delayed bill payment, refusal to disclose publisher sales to the publishers, and removing titles from distribution unless the publisher acquiesced to Amazon in contract disputes. 

But the highest stakes for Amazon's ongoing sparring with the industry came in 2013, when Amazon won a major antitrust lawsuit against Apple and the "Big Six" publishers for monopolistic practices. The companies had banded together in 2007 to set an industry-wide illegal price-fix for the cost of e-books in order to keep Amazon from lowering its prices to the point where no other booksellers could compete.

Proponents of Amazon's lower pricing strategies argue that Amazon is the underdog in the publishing monopoly, not the other way around. But the fact remains that Amazon is a company that singlehandedly controls 30% of the market share of the entire publishing industry. And unlike its competitors, it has a publishing arm, a distribution arm, and a retail arm. Although the price-fixing that the Big Six and Apple were engaged in was blatantly illegal, the maneuver was a unilateral way of competing as a group against Amazon's predatory pricing—that is, its ability to leverage its other retail holdings to offer rock-bottom pricing for its books, effectively decimating the landscape of other booksellers.

In its decision, the Department of Justice observed that Amazon's own alleged antitrust violations were "not an excuse" for illegal price-fixing. Yet instead of further investigating Amazon's predatory pricing and other monopolistic practices, the Department of Justice instead issued a counter-lawsuit against Apple for spearheading the fracas. 

Amazon's victory over Apple and the Big Six was a devastating blow to the publishing industry. In its appeal, Apple called the decision"a radical departure" from existing antitrust laws, which would typically have ruled in favor of smaller companies attempting to compete against a much larger company. The verdict was so devastating to the other participants in the scheme that earlier this year two of the biggest publishers in the world, Random House and Penguin, merged, bringing the Big Six down to the Big Five.

Amazon immediately responded to the verdict by raising its prices, a sign that its longterm strategy of killing off all its competitors through discounts and then gradually raising prices was starting to unfold.

Now, the seeds of that lawsuit are bearing fruit in the contract negotiations with Hachette, as Amazon seeks to recoup some of the control over its distribution that it lost during the years of industry-regulated e-book pricing. Part of the reason Amazon is bringing such pressure to bear on Hachette now is that other publishers will follow Hachette's example, and the results will dictate how Amazon deals with the publishing industry as a whole now that the Department of Justice has essentially given it back its full negotiating power.

Initially, Amazon used multiple tactics against Hachette: delayed titles as well as weighted and unfair book recommendations for titles other than Hachette's, along with a refusal to issue its typical price discounts for Hachette books in order to discourage buyers from selecting those titles. All of this naturally upset Hachette's authors.

But this week, Amazon seems to have accelerated its aggressive stance against Hachette in response to the publisher's continual reluctance to comply with its contractual demands. Not only has it removed the paperback edition of The Everything Store from its store, but pre-orders of major upcoming Hachette titles like The Silkworm and James Patterson's Invisible are also unavailable.

None of this is anything new to publishers. In 2010, in a similar contract dispute with Macmillan, Amazon simply yanked all of the publisher's books from direct distribution on its website until Macmillan gave in.

In February, in a New Yorker piece originally titled "Is Amazon bad for books?," a small press publisher, Melville House co-owner Dennis Johnson, described how Amazon had bullied him into signing up for its paid distribution service despite refusing to relinquish any information to him about his actual on-site sales. 

Johnson described how, after his initial refusal to play on their terms, Amazon representatives approached him at Book Expo and advised him to "get with the program." He also described the way Amazon unsummarily pulled the "Buy" buttons from Melville House titles after he publicly criticized the company.

At the time, the New Yorker noted that Johnson "remains one of the few people in publishing willing to criticize Amazon on the record."

But it seems as though the more Amazon flexes its corporate muscle against the publishing industry, the more members of the community are willing to speak out.

@JoshHarkinson The power disparity in this relationship (Amazon & publishers/booksellers) is already vast.

— Jack Clark (@mappingbabel) May 23, 2014

       Increasingly       , the rhetoric about Amazon's bullying tactics is that the company is violating the same antitrust laws that it used to spear Apple and the Big Five on the Department of Justice's hook. "Monopoly achieved," Johnson wrote after the verdict.

But with the U.S. government failing to scrutinize Amazon's own business practices, as other governments have, it's unlikely that anything will be done to curb Amazon's power over the book economy—or to keep it from expanding the ruthless business practices it's already using on small retailers in the non-book parts of its store.

It might be a good moment to revisit your local independent bookseller.

Photo via sergesgal/Flickr; CC-BY-S.A. 2.0

A few eagle-eyed Redditors have spotted a subtle change to Google's logo.

Can you spot the difference?

Here's how the logo looked Friday:

Photo via Google

And here's how the new version looked the next day:

Photo via Google

Can't tell what changed? That's because not much did. The ubiquitous logo repositioned the "g" one pixel to the right, and the "l" of its name one pixel right and one pixel down.

Here's a before/after, courtesy of G+ user Ron Amadeo:

GIF by Ron Amadeo

So what difference does the change make? A lot, in terms of readability and decipherability. For font aficionados, what Google did is simple: it adjusted the kerning so that the letters are more evenly spaced. In the immortal words of XKCD:

Illustration via XKCD

While it's not clear what prompted the change, we like to believe Google promoted a designer whose secret wish had long been to execute the change. As redditor nal1200 observed, "The bottom of the 'l' and 'e' did not line up horizontally and that, my friend, must have driven some design employee crazy."

This isn't the first time Google has tweaked its logo: Recently Google dropped the longtime textural effect that had characterized the look for most of its 16-year history:

Photo via Google

The new look is cleaner and more browser-friendly. And now it's easier on design buffs, too.

Photo by stshank/Flickr (CC By 2.0)

In 1901, the Internet's favorite inventor, Nikola Tesla, wrote an article titled “Talking With Planets.” In it, he stated that interplanetary communication wasn't the stuff of science fiction, but rather a goal he felt humanity was close to achieving.

More than a century later, NASA has released a free ebook that approaches the idea of interstellar communication as a serious possibility for which humanity ought to be better prepared.

Well, we can't argue with that.

The book, Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication, is a 300-page blueprint for researches and enthusiasts of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Its concern is how modern-day science might be able to successfully interpret any type of "information-rich data" that we receive from the beyond.

While it might be nice to think that Tesla's vision of the "foundation of a universal brotherhood" might be established via a trail of Reese's Pieces a la E.T., actual communication with alien life will in all probability be a one-way burst of communication received via radio waves. Complicating the issue is that by the time such communication reaches Earth, it will probably have traveled millions of years to get to us and be originating from a civilization that's probably already extinct.

But that doesn't mean the possibility of interpretation is hopeless. The book's 15 chapters discuss everything from the possible evolutionary cycle that our chatty alien friends might undergo to the role of linguistics and our own cultural anthropology in helping to derive meaning from whatever data we might be able to grab from a passing radio wave. As Dr. Kathryn E. Denning writes in a chapter on the decipherability of potential communiques:

"If, as is commonly assumed in SETI circles, extraterrestrial civilizations turn out to be vastly older and more advanced than we are, then perhaps they will be kind enough to construct their messages in such a way that we can comprehend them (as in Carl Sagan’s book Contact), and perhaps they will have no difficulty comprehending whatever we say, however we say it."

While this may seem a bit rosy, such optimism is built into SETI. The book includes a thorough history and background in the origins of SETI as a science, and it references numerous linguistic markers including the undeciphered Voynich Manuscript and the watershed Rosetta Stone. Alas, the book does not contain advice on how to decipher whether outer space communications are part of the alien reptilian conspiracy. 

You can download the entire manuscript for free at NASA.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat is up to his old tricks again. Yesterday at the Wales Hay Festival for Literature and the Arts, the famed Who and Sherlock showrunner went on a defensive spiel which should be familiar to Whovians: A woman as the Doctor? Not unless a woman actress is the only person he can think of for the job. 

As everyone who advocated for the Twelfth Doctor to be someone other than a white man knows, Moffat ridiculed the very idea of having a woman fill those shoes. While the fandom seems excited for the new reign of hardcore fan Peter Capaldi, last year, the popular fandom choice was Dame Helen Mirren—who said herself it was high time for a woman to take on the part.

Apart from the enormous pile of evidence suggesting that Moffat would be the least-qualified showrunner in history to write a female Doctor, he seems to think it's a matter of pride at this point to continue to uphold the bland, boring, white dude status quo. As he defensively told the audience:

"I don't know why I'm the one who gets the grief for this. I'm the one who put the dialogue into the show to say it can happen.

"Do you know how it will happen? It will not happen that somebody sits down and says we must turn the Doctor into a woman. That is not how you cast the Doctor.

"A person will pop into the showrunner's head and they'll think. 'Oh, my God, what if it was that person?' And when that person is a woman, that's the day it will happen."

It seems far from likely that such a person will pop into Moffat's head. This is, after all, the same showrunner who has never hired a single female screenwriter during his reign over Doctor Who, and has only ever hired a grand total of two female directors. Hiring women just isn't at the top of Moffat's priority list.

Moffat insisted that "you don't cast for any other reason than for passion and for aesthetics. It's not a political decision, it's an aesthetic decision and will always be."

So basically, the only people who've inspired him with passion for the role are white men. Moffat also made a statement that Capaldi was the only person who'd auditioned for the role of Twelve, which contradicts previous statements made by Neil Gaiman that the original choice for the Doctor was a black actor who'd turned down the role. Either way, it seems as though Moffat is missing an opportunity to see increased diversity for the Doctor as an expansion of all the things fans love about the Doctor rather than a limitation on the dramatic possibilities of the show. 

Moffat also dropped the bombshell that respective stars Benedict Cumberbatch and David Tennant almost didn't become geek culture icons. Why? Because according to Moffat, the BBC thought the tousle-headed lads weren't sexy enough. Apparently, the BBC knows news, period drama, and British comedy, but not a sex symbol when it sees one.

"They said of casting David Tennant as Casanova, 'Damn, you should have cast someone sexier.' With Benedict Cumberbatch, we were told the same thing. 'You promised us a sexy Sherlock, not him.'"

Yikes! This would be the same David Tennant who would go on to be voted the Sexiest Man in the Universe. And, well, we all know what Mr. Cumberbatch does to the hearts and minds of Sherlockians across the globe.

The BBC apparently ate their words after a few years of Tennant's reign as the Tenth Doctor. Moffat claimed that when Tennant left the role, the BBC nearly canceled the show altogether:

"David owned that role in a spectacular way, gave it an all-new cheeky, sexy performance and became a national treasure. And he didn't do it instantly, he did it over time. So the idea that Doctor Who could go on at all in the absence of David was a huge question, I didn't realize how many people thought it wouldn't succeed at all. That was quite terrifying when I found out about it later. I think there were plans maybe to consider ending it. It was Russell saying, you are not allowed to end it."

In any case, it seems that the exit of Tennant has done very little to change the face of the franchise. After all, it's still straight, white, and male.

Photo via Gage Skidmore/Flickr; CC-BY-S.A. 3.0

What do you do if your only shelter from a massive oncoming twister are four pre-fab walls?

The answer for the brave men of this YouTube video? Run to the truck, prepare for the worst, and film the whole thing.

Watford City, N.D., is one of many tiny towns housing the transient worker population of the recent North Dakota oil boom. The temporary workers' camp there was no match for the massive tornado that swept through the town yesterday, injuring nine people and destroying 15 trailers. 

Dan Yorgason and his friend were two such workers who weren't about to stick around and wait for the tornado to hit. When they realized they had nowhere to go, they hopped in their truck to ride out the storm—and filmed the whole terrifying spectacle.

Ordinarily, taking shelter in a vehicle is one of the worst things you can do in a storm, but residents of the Watford City camp had few alternatives. Most of the many videos yesterday were filmed from the relative shelter of trucks and cars. In another video, one woman could be heard chanting, "Oh my Jesus, we got nowhere to go."

Another pair, Damon Damron and his wife, were lucky enough to be further away from the storm. They filmed the whole spectacular formation and touchdown. The good part starts at 2:17, with a bonus for the part where Damron yells, "Yeehaw! Go, baby!"  

While Yorgason and Damron were able to laugh in the face of disaster, they were lucky to escape with their lives. "We were afraid for our lives, so, yes, we swore," Yorgason wrote on YouTube about the tornado, which almost passed right over his head.

Screengrab via YouTube