#i may just be projecting the fact i wanna gain some mass on them

[razzmothazz]

Do you approve of hc: Tsukasa is a little chubby, and whenever he got a bit insecure about it, wxs would make him feel better about it because it means he's healthy, actually hhrhshss

YES YES YES !!!!!!!! whenever he gets insecure hes hit with the "a star has to eat well to be healthy"!!!!! his natural state is NOT skinny. he also definetly has at least a bit of muscle with how much exercise he does !!!!

tbh i approve every hc of the pjsk cast not being skin and bones like i am but this especially applies to my favs (⁠｡⁠•̀⁠ᴗ⁠-⁠)☆

[howtohero]

#246 Headless Horsemen (and variants!)

For as long as there have been heads and as long as there have been horses, (historians are split on which came first) there have been headed horsemen. Men (or women) with heads riding horses that also have heads. There’s not really much to say there, and if that had been where the story ended we certainly wouldn’t be wasting your oh so precious time talking about it today. But, as anybody from Sleepy Hollow can tell you, that is not where the story ends! In almost no time at all headed horsemen became last year’s model as horsemen technology marched forward into a greater and grander tomorrow! You see, horsemen researchers quickly discovered that having a man with a head and a horse with a head was redundant and inefficient. One second, I think I have a transcript from that meeting somewhere around here… (If you’re thinking to yourself now, “bah, obviously if horses had been invented surely heads had been too. What a stupid debate these historians are having,” then get ready {and get amped} to eat those words you stupid stupid reader.) Ah here it is:

Ex-dcotor Bernadier Baldwin barges into the room, scattering papers and interns. His license to call himself a doctor in any capacity had been revoked the previous day on account of his idea being too radical and too transformative for the tiny minds of the ethics board. “Stop everything!” He shouts while flipping a security guard over a nearby table, reducing it to splinters. A group of tired men and women look at him with tired expressions on their tired faces. They are tired because this is the eleventh time Bernadier Baldwin has barged into a meeting this week. “I’ve just had a major breakthrough that can revolutionize horseman technology forever!” Bernadier exclaims as he roundhouse kicks a nurse through the skylight. He is very big on exclaiming things these days. He believes it can help fight the common cold. He has been known to say that a common man would never exclaim so boldly and so loudly. “Mr. Baldwin, for the last time, this is a hospital. There are no horses here,” a tired doctor says tiredly. There used to be horses at this hospital, but that was long time ago and everybody generally agreed that it was a pretty bad idea. “You fool! Don’t you see! If a horse has a head and a man has a head that’s inefficient! That’s too many heads!” Bernadier exclaims exclamatorily while strangling the man who coined the phrase “two heads are better than one” to death.   “Security,” says a different, even more tired, doctor in a different, even more tired fashion. “Don’t you see! There are too many heads! There are too many heads!” Bernadier hollers at the top of his lungs. He jumps on the table, picks up the meeting’s stenographer and hurls her out a nearby window.

The transcript ends there on account of the stenographer being chucked out a window but you get the idea!

Bernadier Baldwin went on to truly change the face of horseback riding for centuries to come. First with his groundbreaking, innovative, transformative Headless Horseman program. (They say that Baldwin himself personally beheaded hundreds of horseman with his bare hands during the early years of the program. Truly he is a visionary and a hero.) Then, after realizing that it was not necessarily the man head that was the redundant head, he launched his incredible, forward-thinking, unprecedented Headless Manhorse program. It was around this point that Baldwin was killed in a very tragic horse-operated steamroller accident, but the mark he made on the horse world was undeniable, and not soon forgotten. His legendary, “Notebook of Brilliant, Unparalleled, Mind-Blowing Ideas” was recovered and his notes were used to spearhead such influential, world-changing, stupefying projects as the Horseless Headsman and Manless Horsehead initiatives and the rest, as they say in the biz, is horsestory.

Headless Horsemen: In discussing these revolutionary, hoopstatic, glorious abominations of science and crimes against creation, it only makes sense to start with the original. Most of the famous Headless Horsemen that you’ve either heard about or fought (or befriended, the stereotype that all headless horsemen are bloodthirsty and evil is a cruel stereotype that this blog refuses to perpetuate!) tend to be ghosts or spirits. This is, practically speaking, because horsemen tend not to survive being headless. At first, these guillotined ghouls tended to haunt old timey towns or pumpkin patches and generally stirred up discontent and distress wherever they went. Their goal, in most things, tended to be to kick up enough trouble to cause people to “lose their heads.” Which I suppose is fair, since they literally don’t have heads. Over the years though, these original headless horsemen have grown more comfortable in their role in society and have actually made great strides in both their physical, and spectral communities. The communities where headless horsemen have taken up residence generally tend to fill up with people who are pretty much cool, if not excited to live in a town with a horse-riding haunter who occasionally steals pumpkins. These communities have regular Jack-o-Lantern carving sessions in order to present their resident ghosts with new heads and generally work to include their horsemen in community events in any way they can. In turn, the headless horsemen will often take on the role of scaring off any newcomers to the town that the townsfolk don’t particularly like. This relationship is one of many beautiful instances of symbiosis in nature.

These original headless horsemen have also become something like apparition activists! Before they came along en masse, headless ghosts were looked down upon by some in the ghost community. You know, because they don’t have heads. This is, of course, terrible and any ghost who thinks that someone is lesser because they don’t have a head is a jerk and you may quote me on that! Now though, with the rise of headless horsemen, headless ghosts need only to find themselves a ghostly horse and they’re suddenly one of the coolest ghosts in town. The headless horsemen have become trendsetters and tastemakers among ghosts and they use their ghostly steeds to spread their messages of love and inclusion all around the ghost world. Several of them have even taken up activism in the living world and you’d be hard pressed to find a progressive cause that doesn’t count headless horsemen among their members.

If you, in your capacity as a superhero, ever find yourself having to fight a headless horseman you should know that there are not many practical differences between fighting a regular ghost and fighting a ghost that has traded its head for a cool spectral horse. A vacuum cleaner or a proton blaster should do the trick. Just be aware that they might try to throw their disembodied head at you, which is gross. But an empty, lifeless head is not all that heavy. You can probably just catch it. If you want to practice catching lifeless, round projectiles, try entering into the annual superhero four-corner dodgeball tournament that probably is a real thing. (Four corner dodgeball is like regular dodgeball, except for instead of having two teams, each dominating one half of the gym, there are four teams, each one dominating one corner of the gym. It’s three times scarier than regular dodgeball and it is the worst.) Just make sure you don’t accidentally enroll in four-corner live dodgeball tournament where all the dodgeballs are granted sentience. Because catching a live round object is a very different skill and one that is not applicable to this situation!

Headless Manhorse: These beheaded broncos are similar to their horsemen counterparts, except without any of the finesse or social skills. These horses are honestly just buck wild. They are cursed with eternal life while also not having any head. They wanna run wild and live free, like a horse, but they don’t have the eyes, ears, nose, or brain to do that in a responsible manner. Headless Manhorses can frequently be seen frolicking wildly in urban areas, causing a ruckus and trampling defenseless automobiles. While regular horses can be appeased with apples or sugar cubes, headless manhorses offer no such recourse. If they decide they wanna trample you with their hooves, you kind of just have to let them until they get bored. If you ever see a headless manhorse, your best bet is to run. I don’t care what kind of superpowers you have. A headless manhorse will mess you up. 

Horseless Headsmen: Ever wonder what happens to all those heads that need to be sacrificed in order to create a quality headless horseman? Well, most of them are just gross decapitated heads. Sometimes they’ll get thrown at you. But every one of out of a hundred of these decapitated heads spontaneously gains a life of its own and becomes a horseless headman! These floating zombie heads tend to just be absolutely giddy at the fact that they are alive. I think most of us would agree that our bodies are more often than not holding us back from realizing our full potential. Horseless headsmen have the rare opportunity to be completely free from all that junk that exists from the neck down. They just float around cracking jokes and asking people on the street to help them do their hair for them. They are truly living the life. Really getting ahead in life. 

Manless Horsehead: Oh gosh, if you thought a headless manhorse was terrifying you don’t ever want to run into a manless horsehead. These have all the unbridled rage and darkness of a horse but without being hindered by their physical bodies! These horeheads can just float around whinnying and biting people and mugging me specifically. (I mean come on! I’ve been mugged by a manless horsehead on twelve separate occasions. That can’t be a coincidence.) 

Nearly Headless Horsemen: This is nothing. This is a ghost who couldn’t even be arsed to be decapitated correctly. Disgraceful. You can look down on these guys for sure. Nearly headless. Please. How about we just call it what it is. Headed. 

[jeremyhodge2]

Report From Dera’a, Cradle of the Syrian Revolution

The Nation: Sept. 20, 2017

By Jeremy Hodge

Syria’s southern provinces are unique among opposition-held areas in having limited the expansion of Islamist extremist groups. The Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL), Ahrar al-Sham, and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), successor to the Al Qaeda–linked Jabhat al-Nusra, maintain only a modest foothold at best in the region, compared with the much larger, more influential “Southern Front” coalition, made up of moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA) factions that support democracy.

The Assad regime nonetheless continues to label many factions of the Southern Front as “terrorists” and to violate the de-escalation brokered in July by the United States and Russia.

This letter, written in July and August, is part of a project that draws on citizen journalists to depict daily life in war zones where much of the world press cannot travel due to threats from the warring parties. The project, based at Stony Brook University’s Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting, is funded by the Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation. New York–based freelance journalist Jeremy Hodge, a former editor of the Yemen Times and Syria Direct, edited. As Hodge notes in his accompanying piece, here, the author of the article below, Khaled al Zubi, was killed, along with his 1-month-old son and brother, by a roadside bomb soon after filing his article.

Dera’a—In July, in one of President Trump’s first foreign-policy advances, the United States, Russia, and Jordan brokered a cease-fire between the Syrian regime and opposition forces in the country’s southern provinces along the Jordanian border. The deal raised many people’s hopes that a new era had begun, one that would rein in Bashar al-Assad’s military operations against his own people. That’s not the way it worked out.

Several weeks ago, I awoke late at night to the whizzing sound of regime aircraft circling the skies above my village, Muleiha Sharqiyya, and my 1-month-old son, crying. It was his first experience with warplanes in his short life, and no doubt scary. I rolled over and quickly scanned my phone; friends on WhatsApp were saying that several hundred Syrian and Russian forces were gathering outside Sama Hneidat, just east of Muleiha Sharqiyya, in apparent preparation for an assault. Not more than 15 minutes later, FSA rebel convoys carrying reinforcements could be heard passing down the main road heading east, toward the regime buildup.

Muleiha Sharqiyya is part of a string of towns in Syria’s southernmost Dera’a province that collectively form a sort of border between regime- and opposition-held territory. Our hamlet of 6,000 faces several regime-held towns located just under two miles east, well within range of small artillery. A few miles south looms the sprawling Tha’la military air base, where Assad’s forces regularly assemble before launching assaults on cities and towns in east Dera’a.

I got up and texted Yasser, a colleague who worked the nearest checkpoint through which the convoy was undoubtedly passing. “It’s nothing, inshallah,” he wrote, “but some of the guys think they [the regime] might wanna take the reservoir before the winter.” This was a reference to the water reservoir in a nearby village, which serves both regime and opposition farms.

“There’s foreigners with them,” Yasser added, which usually meant Iranians, Afghans, or even Russians.

By the end of the night, the FSA mustered a big-enough show of force to deter the pro-regime forces without firing a shot. It’s a testimony to the organization and readiness of opposition forces here and the popular support they enjoy.

The Syrian revolution began in Dera’a in 2011, and what transpires here is crucial to the viability of a political solution to the Syrian conflict. It was in Dera’a city that Syrian youth sprayed “The people want the fall of the regime” on walls and were arrested on March 6 of that year. The first mass protest against the regime—the so-called “Day of Rage”—occurred on March 15. On March 24, Dera’a saw the first massacre of the revolution, when security forces killed more than 200 civilians just outside the Omari mosque in Dera’a’s Old City. [The Nation could not independently verify this figure and therefore does not endorse its authenticity. International reporting at the time of the event placed the number killed there, on that day and in the days afterward, at anywhere from 5 to 150.]

Perhaps because the revolution began here, its spirit has been preserved in its purest form in the south. Unlike other liberated areas—such as Idlib in the north and East Ghouta in the Damascus suburbs, which are dominated by Islamist military factions—FSA factions here, collectively known as the Southern Front, have successfully prevented the spread of such groups. Both a free press and civil society thrive here, along with independent civil courts that resolve disputes between individuals. If the Assad regime can’t preserve a fragile peace with the Southern Front, it’s unlikely to do so elsewhere.

The fact that the Southern Front factions are committed to the principles of democracy has a downside. This region has historically enjoyed more support from the United States, Britain, and other sectors of the international community than other FSA factions and has been spared the grinding poverty in besieged parts of Syria where Islamists or other radical forces have sway. On the other hand, much of what goes on in our province goes unreported, both internationally and in the regional press. When violations occur, they often go unnoticed.

That is not to say that locals are uninformed. The near-clash in my area took place in late July, just over two months after the fourth round of talks in Astana, Kazakhstan, in May, where Russia, Iran, and Turkey came up with the idea of implementing “de-escalation zones” across Syria. But neither those talks nor the US-brokered cease-fire has stopped regime aircraft from regularly bombing Dera’a city, the large provincial capital. Nonetheless, on this particular night, in Sama Hneidat, regime forces may have figured that it wasn’t worth violating the cease-fire over a battle they were likely to lose.

“Putin’s playing with Papa Trump,” a neighbor, Abu Faysal, told me the next morning, over coffee. “Everyone thinks Trump is crazy and that Putin—guided by logic—is pulling the strings,” he added. “What they don’t realize is that Syria makes everybody crazy.” Abu Faysal was convinced that the regime buildup was a Russian attempt to intimidate both the FSA and the United States to gain leverage for the next round of talks, whenever they would be. “Trump tried to show Russia he was the worst by bombing Assad,” a reference to the April 6 US airstrikes on Syria’s Shayrat air base after Assad used chemical weapons in Khan Sheikhoun. “Now Putin’s saying, ‘I can be crazy too, but a different kind of crazy.’”

BEGINNINGS

When the “Day of Rage” protests began, I was an economics major at Tishreen University in the northwest province of Latakia. Dominated by the Assad family’s minority Alawite sect, Latakia has always been loyal to the regime, and Tishreen University was no different. When I and other students organized a march in solidarity with Dera’a, most of the student body watched from the sidelines as we entered the main quad, to be detained by school security.

By April 2011, many of the Tishreen students were labeling the protesters in Dera’a as radical Sunni jihadists. The regime had already adopted the slogan “us or the terrorists.” The university paper published articles claiming that intelligence had been intercepted demonstrating that “calls for help” had been made to international jihadists like Al Qaeda.

It was shocking to hear what was being said about my distant home province. The mood on campus was becoming so different from what I was hearing back home that I decided to leave university, return home, and join the protesters, or at least comfort my family. In the end I did both, as I learned soon after that one of my cousins, Ahmed, had been shot and wounded by security forces during a demonstration.

Shortly after my return home, six friends and I, armed with just two AK-47s and several hunting rifles, set up our town’s first neighborhood watch along the road leading south toward the Tha’la air base, which we would man at night. It was a modest effort, but our ranks would slowly grow, and to our surprise, we got support from sympathetic army officers, many of whom would later defect and join the opposition.

One such person was Zakaria, a sergeant from the northeastern town of Qamishli who was stationed at the 52nd Brigade base located just west of Muleiha Sharqiyya. Zakaria often frequented the mobile-phone shop my family owned, initially to buy credit for his phone. As time went on, Zakaria became more and more friendly with me and our staff, and ultimately began to speak about his desire to defect, saying that he feared what would happen to his family if he were killed.

One day Zakaria gave me his phone number and told me to call if I needed anything. I wasn’t sure if he was aware of my nighttime activity manning an armed checkpoint to deter his security forces. However, several weeks later, it was Zakaria who reached out to me, and it was clear from our conversation that he was privy to what I was up to.

“Security forces are going to launch night raids tonight looking for Khaled, Fadi, and Maher,” he said, referring to another volunteer named Khaled. “They’re going to charge them with engaging in terrorist activity.” I forwarded the message, advising all three to leave town. I also advised the other guys manning the checkpoint to stay home. Sure enough, the raids were launched, but the security forces came up empty-handed.

“Whoever saves one life—it is as if he had saved all of mankind,” I told Zakaria the next day, citing a well-known passage from the Quran and Talmud during a phone call thanking him for his help. He later defected from the army while on leave in Damascus. Before doing so he introduced us to other sympathetic army officers who would continue to help us stay several steps ahead of the regime. The last I heard, Zakaria was dead, killed while fighting the regime alongside an FSA faction in the eastern Damascus suburb of Qabun.

As the months went on, I switched from carrying a rifle to a camera. As the armed-insurgency phase of the revolution intensified, more and more Syrian army officers defected to the opposition who were far more qualified than I to provide security for our town. Furthermore, working at my family’s mobile-phone shop afforded me more experience than most people in my area working with computers, cameras, and other forms of technology.

My experience with Zakaria and other army officers who would later defect also meant I was uniquely placed to coordinate with the armed factions and track developments through the course of the revolution. I dived headfirst into journalism and activism and haven’t looked back. My work has taken me to front lines all over the south, where I’ve been able to witness FSA losses and gains and had the privilege of developing ties with other like-minded activists. Our job is to use our cameras to document regime war crimes and tell individual stories of triumph, failure, and perseverance that collectively make up the ethos of resistance in the south.

My work allows me to see firsthand the solidarity among the southern factions that characterize our region. Unlike in other parts of the country, where individual groups lay claim to specific towns, regions, or swaths of land, in many parts of the south armed brigades and factions share territory and come and go between different front lines, as the situation requires. This freedom of movement extends to myself and others, and is a testament to our region’s success: Though I pledge allegiance to no faction, my work on behalf of the Syrian revolution ingratiates me with the Southern Front factions, whom I call my brothers.

PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY

Ever since the fourth round of Astana talks in early May, when de-escalation zones were first broached, Syrian regime forces have adopted a series of new tactics in the Dera’a countryside that appear to be aimed at provoking a violent response from FSA opposition forces, while allowing the regime to maintain plausible deniability.

The first incident occurred between May 28 and 30, when, similar to what happened in Sama Hneidat, hundreds of pro-Assad Iranian, Afghan, and Lebanese Hezbollah fighters mobilized with dozens of tanks and heavy artillery over a period of three days outside the town of Khirbat Ghazala, six miles northeast of Dera’a city. The show of force was interpreted by FSA artillery units stationed in the area as a direct provocation.

Muhammad Badr al-Izra’i, an FSA commander stationed with a local artillery brigade, told me regime columns were approaching from two different directions, one from Damascus and the second from the front lines in Dera’a city.

Al-Izra’i was convinced the regime would claim it was implementing the terms of the Astana talks by de-escalating the fight in Dera’a and then, after the fact, send in the second column the next day and commit a massacre in Dera’a city. “They wanted to hide this fact from the international community, so they withdrew some forces first, in order to provide cover,” he said.

To preempt an ambush of FSA forces in Dera’a city, al-Izra’i’s unit leader decided to fire on the regime forces approaching from Dera’a. Regime ranks took heavy losses, scattered, and withdrew in different directions. “Our actions that day are what showed the regime we’re not willing to stand for such trickery,” he said. The FSA stand at Khirbat Ghazala may explain why pro-regime forces stood down later in Sama Hneidat after the FSA mobilized its own reinforcements.

Since then, regime forces have avoided clashing directly in the open with FSA factions in the Dera’a countryside, choosing instead to launch air strikes or quick hit and-run artillery attacks. The regime, it seems, is changing its tactics. Throughout June and July, regime forces have used airstrikes or hit-and-run artillery against the towns of Sayda, al-Na’ima, al-Laja, and the al-Nasib border crossing with Jordan. As it launches airstrikes, the regime claims it does so in response to the movement of terrorist groups, knowing that moderate FSA forces dominate opposition areas.

One of those killed in a June 22 air strike in al-Na’ima was a close friend, Mustafa Abd al-Nur, a civilian who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when Syrian regime jets dropped their bombs. Regime violations of the agreed-upon de-escalation zone aren’t as bad here as they are in other areas—in particular East Ghouta—but innocent people are still being killed due to the regime’s failure to live up to its promises.

Most southerners are skeptical of Russian and regime intentions in the de-escalation zones. No one believes that Assad or his allies seriously intend to let the Syrian opposition maintain control of any part of the country in the mid- to long term. The Southern Front in turn has not abandoned its aim to defeat Assad militarily or force his government to dissolve.

However, many here support de-escalation zones—but on the condition that Jordan and Russia, not Iran, serve as guarantors. That will allow the Southern Front time to redress problems within the region that have undermined the progress of our revolution for several years—in particular, rooting out what little remains of ISIS, HTS, and other extremist factions. I expect the regime would also like to take advantage of the calm to carry out a bit of spring-cleaning on its side as well.

For now, the Assad regime is likely to try to sabotage and weaken the FSA in the south. Late at night on June 28, my own home was shot up by unknown assailants as I was sleeping next to my wife, just five days before the birth of our son. Luckily, no one was hurt, and we left to stay with family members in the town of Sayda, a safer spot deeper in opposition-held territory. My son, exposed to the sound of gunshots before his own birth and the sound of warplanes within his first month, will undoubtedly grow up fast, and will likely become desensitized to the sounds of war before he’s able to walk.

As of now we don’t know who is responsible for the shooting. It could be elements of the Assad regime infiltrating behind enemy lines in order to kill those of us who are most active in the media. Or it could be the HTS/Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra), whom I’ve been outspoken against since their arrival in the region back in 2013.

Luckily, the south hasn’t fallen under the sway of radical jihadists as in other parts of the country, such as Idlib, East Ghouta, and Qalamoun. This stems partially from the social dynamics of the south and partially from luck. When the revolution began, many radical groups focused their efforts around Syria’s urban enclaves, such as Damascus, Hama, and Aleppo, ignoring the south. By the time Jabhat al-Nusra, ISIS, and others sought to penetrate the region, the social, democratic, and military infrastructure in place was strong enough to resist their spread.

This infrastructure was undergirded by resilient communal ties that have evolved and intertwined since the earliest days of the revolution, when individuals such as myself and others took the initial risks that were needed to inspire others and instill in them a sense of purpose. The south’s status as the birthplace of the revolution means we have had more time to evolve and strengthen these ties, building trust between individuals, communities, and towns that have in turn provided fertile ground for the development of grassroots, democratic reform.

Many have died defending the south, and I expect many more will. However, military power alone hasn’t got us where we are.

Activists and journalists such as myself aren’t doing it for salary or some messianic ideology full of empty promises. We fight for our families, our homes, and the dignity of our towns. The civil, social, and political infrastructure is the bedrock that holds our foundation in place, even if soldiers die in the fighting. We think our model is an example, and we trust that our allies abroad won’t abandon us. I believe the south will prevail.

[dietcoachesofamerica]

9/15/2017: Jeepers Creepers 3 Is Disturbing (Offscreen)

By Ian Fortey

If IT and other efforts from Hollywood haven't been doing their job terrifying you lately, then don't worry, because Jeepers Creepers 3 is on the way. To clarify, I have no idea if the movie itself is scary, and it doesn't matter, because the behind-the-scenes story of Jeepers Creepers is far more unsettling than anything they're going to put on the screen, thanks to pedophilic director Victor Salva.

As we've mentioned to you before, Salva was convicted of molesting a 12-year-old actor from one of his films, and filming the encounter, as well as having child pornography in his possession, because he is what is clinically known as shit. After serving his 15-month sentence, Salva took a few years off before getting right back to work making movies, with the Jeepers Creepers franchise now being his most famous and popular work, and why not? Remember all those weirdly shirtless boys in the sequel? Really tip-top art there.

Now, I legit really enjoyed Jeepers Creepers before I knew what kind of monstrosity Salva was in real life. And I have no goddamn desire whatsoever to see part three. I don't give a shit how the story wraps up, because fuck this guy and his whole fucking artistic process.

Read Next

You Lose A Bit Of Humanity: 5 WTF Realities Of Journalism

The idea that you need to separate the artist from their art is flawed for two very significant reasons in this case. The first is that Salva molested a child actor who was in one of his films, so Salva the artist was in the midst of making his creepy fuck art when he committed his atrocious act. His "artistic process" facilitated his crime. The second thing is that if you found out Vincent van Gogh used to jerk off into salads when he painted those sunflowers, that'd give you some pause. But Monet wasn't making a movie about a winged monster with witty vanity plates who eats body parts. Art may be subjective, but for fuck's sake, it's Jeepers Creepers 3, not "Starry Night."

Hollywood is bursting at the seams with screenwriting hopefuls and would-be directors. We don't need to keep hiring people who molest children; there are plenty of other good people with great ideas who don't commit skin-crawling atrocities against others. Salva served his time, sure, but he doesn't need a spotlight to be famous now, we don't need to keep celebrating a man who used this very work to enable his crimes. Let the turd golem grow and sell mail-order Bonsai trees away from the public. Maybe give some of these other creative types a chance, take that moral high ground that says yes, you can stand to live your life without that 90 minutes of bat-winged monster fiction. Let a guy whose worst habit is that he scratches his balls in public direct a movie for you. Have some goddamn priorities.

9/14/2017: The Shopping Apocalypse Is Nigh, So Pray For A Swift Death

By Lydia Bugg

The Bible says that the apocalypse will be announced by seven angels blowing seven trumpets, but we at Cracked think there is a much more subtle indicator that the end times are near, which we have all been missing: this article from The Atlantic titled "The Future Of Retail Is Stores That Aren't Stores." I don't want to be over-dramatic here, but try to read this entire article without taking to the street to proselytize about the apocalypse.

It's impossible to get through the first sentence without realizing society doesn't deserve to continue to exist. An Apple executive says, "We actually don't call them 'stores' anymore -- we call them 'town squares.'" If you haven't passed out from internal hemorrhaging, the article continues with choice bits like "Starbucks, watching with distaste the rise of high-end competitors like Stumptown and Blue Bottle, a couple years ago opened a 15,000-square-foot 'roastery' in Seattle. 'We're going to take the customer on a journey, immersing them in an interactive environment where they'll be introduced to handcrafted, small-batch coffees within feet of where they're being roasted,' Howard Schultz, Starbucks's CEO, told The New York Times." A ... a "roastery?" Well. Maybe we're already dead, and this is Hell.

What is going on here? Are retail stores super out of touch with reality, or are we the problem? If you're one of the few brave souls who can make it five paragraphs into this article without feeling the cold hands of death wrapping around your neck, you'll come upon a section that discusses Urban Outfitters' acquisition of a pizza chain: "The idea is that pizzerias might be placed near, or even in, the stores. 'Now you can order a sofa on the internet,' Marc Vetri, the chain's founder, told Bloomberg, adding, 'if you want to eat at the hot new restaurant, you have to leave your living room and you have to venture out.'" Again, this is about Urban Outfitters acquiring a PIZZA chain. It's literally the one food you don't have to leave your house to obtain anywhere in the U.S.

The most comforting thought I had reading this article is that we may finally have concrete proof that the world is secretly being run by lizard people. Corporations' only understanding of people seems to be "They eat, they drink, then they go to the gym to work off the things they ate and drank. Most curious. How can we take advantage of these puny humans' consumer needs? How can we get them to buy our poorly constructed T-shirts? They enjoy pizza. Perhaps if we ply them with pizza, they will take the shirts? Perhaps we must construct a shirt that can be eaten?"

I've never before read an article about retail shopping that so reminded me of my own mortality. Happy Thursday, everyone. Doesn't it feel like a Friday today? We're all going to die.

9/13/2017: The Fast & Furious Beefs Are Now A Marketing Tool

By John Cheese

There's another highly contrived, very marketed beef going on with the Fast & Furious crew. This time, it's between Tyrese Gibson and the Rock -- because if you're going to use a public spat to market a movie, it absolutely has to include the Rock. Tryrese went on Instagram and posted (then deleted) the following:

If you move forward with that #Hobbs movie you will have purposefully ignored the heart to heart moment we had in my sprinter -- I don't wanna hear from you until you remember what we talked about -- I'm on your timeline cause you're not responding to my text messages -- #FastFamily is just that a family...we don't fly solo.

Here's the thing: Their most successful movie was the last one, which did around $1.2 billion worldwide. That went hand in hand with the now-famous Rock vs. Vin Diesel beef -- which, by sheer coincidence, made approximately 1.2 billion headlines in the lead-up to the movie. So let's say you're a marketing executive and you see that a project rakes in over a billion dollars. What do you do with the new movie? Or a spinoff from that movie? You do exactly what you did the last time. Every trailer needs to be recreated. Every interview needs to be repeated. Every beef needs to be rebeefed. Make no mistake, this is absolutely a marketing strategy. And it's going to continue with every new film they produce.

The thing is, it's gotten really transparent at this point, and it's making my eye muscles hurt from all the rolling. Because if I'm wrong, and it's not contrived, it means that every single person who works on the crew of the Fast & Furious franchise is a moronic fucking child. And it means that Tyrese Gibson has no idea how movies or money or actors or human brains work. So I'm going to prefer to think of it as a genius form of advertisement, because I can't handle the thought of grown-ass adults being that ungodly fucking stupid.

9/12/2017: Please Learn Another Acting Trick, Christian Bale

By Daniel Dockery

Alright, Christian Bale. We get it. You're really good at putting on and losing weight at a rapid pace. It's very neat, and I'm sure that you're a hit at parties, along with Guy Who Can Blow Vape Smoke Rings and Guy With An Acoustic Guitar Who Wasn't Invited.

If you hadn't heard, Mad Libs has become reality now that Christian Bale is playing Dick Cheney in an upcoming movie. Hollywood is apparently so devoid of people who even faintly resemble the Chensmoker that they had to go with Welsh Greek God Christian Bale. And how has Bale prepared himself for the role? "I've just been eating a lot of pies," he said, presumably as mashed blueberries dropped from his pockets.

Let's quickly recount Bale's epic weight loss/gain saga, which has more drama than his Batman films could ever muster. And as an added bonus, we'll use his favorite unit of measurement: pies.

To play a Wall Street sociopath with the body of John Cena in American Psycho, Christian Bale gained four pies. He maintained this weight to look rugged in Reign Of Fire, but dropped six whole pies to garner the emaciated frame required for The Machinist. Christopher Nolan came a-knocking with four pies stacked precariously in each hand. "Christian, will you be my Batman?" Later, Nolan received an empty pie tin, and written in tiny crust pieces at the bottom of it was the word "Yes."

Christian lost more pies to portray a POW in Rescue Dawn, and terrorized every pie shop in Philadelphia to get into shape for The Dark Knight. "No pies for you," said the director of The Fighter, but Christian Bale was back in the habit for The Dark Knight Rises. Out Of The Furnace demanded a relatively pie-less daily regimen from Christian, but this was balanced by American Hustle necessitating the ingesting of a pie and that pie's baker each day. He looked like a man who had never even heard of pies in The Big Short, and now we arrive at Backseat, in which Christian Bale, sitting atop his pie throne, can truly be at peace.

But pies alone cannot truly be the inspiration for Bale's fluctuating body mass. In fact, I think it's reasonable to say that this might be his superpower. How else can you explain this? "I've just been eating a lot of pies" sounds like the perfect cover up for Bruce Wayne just before he goes down to his cave and, in a matter of seconds, changes his figure to fit his next acting role. It's why he played Batman. Batman doesn't have any powers either, so it alleviates suspicion that anything abnormal is going on.

But look, Christian. You no longer need to hide your abilities from the world. We're actually getting pretty sick of watching you do this to your body every few years , and I'm sure that your body is pretty sick of it too. Yeah, it seemed astounding when you went from The Machinist to Batman Begins, but you've become the acting equivalent of every stand-up comedian who ends their set with their freshest Enron and Monica Lewinsky jokes. I'm not trying to say that it's not impressive, as my body type, no matter what I do, seems to maintain that classic "talking grub worm in an animated children's film" look. But we know that you're talented enough to go at least three movies without suddenly revealing that you've either acquired flawless sixpack abs or a sudden affinity for XXXL shirts.

Do it for your career. Do it for cinema. Do it for the pie makers of the world. They are so, so tired.

9/11/2017: PewDiePie Would Be Fired If He Had Any Other Job

By Lydia Bugg

Surprise! PewDiePie did something racist. What's that, you say? You're not at all surprised? This is something we've discussed before, and at length? Yet here we are again, shocked and surprised that PewDiePie dropped the N-word.

OK, maybe we're not surprised, but there are people out there defending him, because apparently PewDiePie should be allowed to do a thing that would get you fired from McDonald's and not have it affect his career at all. Think about it -- if you worked at McDonald's and you burnt your hand on the fry machine and your response was to call the fry machine the N-word, your manager Kyle would be asking to have a quick chat with you in his office.

Online gaming is PewDiePie's job, and he makes a LOT of money from it -- somewhere around $15 million in 2016. He went into work and said the N-word at his $15 million job. It's almost worse than just saying the N-word at work, because he's not just an employee; he is the brand, and his performance is his product. It's equivalent to Coca-Cola casually dropping the N-word into a commercial.

Twitter currently has a trending hashtag called "PewDiePie did nothing wrong." The overall sentiment of diehard fans seems to be that "he didn't mean it in a bad way," which is a thing he said in the video after correcting from the N-word to "fucking asshole." I know that when I call people a fucking asshole, it's always meant as a term of endearment. Sometimes I call up my mom on the phone and just yell "'Sup, you fucking asshole," because she's chill and she gets that I mean it in a good way.

There's also the argument that he said it "in the heat of the moment," which makes it OK. Except that you don't say that word in the heat of the moment unless it's already locked and loaded in your vocabulary for future use. There are 171,476 words in the English language, and he chose to use that word. We've all said things in the heat of the moment. I've dropped things on my toe before, but there are about 171,475 words I would choose to say instead of that one. He could have called the guy a piano fucker, or a shit pigeon, or literally anything else, but he didn't. He said the N-word at his job, where the majority of his audience is children.

Now video game developer Campo Santo is filing a copyright takedown request so that PewDiePie can no longer display videos of their games, and they're encouraging other gaming companies to follow suit. So I guess the moral of the story is: Don't say the N-word at work. That's a thing that apparently needs to be said to a 27-year-old adult man in the year of our lord 2017.

For more, check out This Week In Pop Culture (9/08/17) and What Stupid Thing Is Trending Now? (9/10/2017).

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Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/this-week-in-pop-culture-91517/