Me, age 3 (I think), in my Easter dress.

This is a very interesting piece at Jezebel speculating about why…. ahem, jizzing in a woman’s face is considered so chic in pornography and beyond.

There’s a chance that several major food companies are using aborted fetuses in their food, or Oklahoma Senator Ralph Shortey is an idiot. At Gawker.

Here’s a breakdown of what black people watch on TV.

Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre is working on a experimental performance piece about ICP. Yup, read that sentence again.

I dunno, maybe I’m over sensitive, and too PC, and all the other things that ignorant folk sometimes say when they’re being assholes, but I think that a movie poster like this kinda encourages fear.

Seriously? NO ONE IS SAFE with a picture of a black man’s face, even a face as beloved as Denzel’s? It just seems like it’s encouraging some deep down fears. By the way, if the movie is Denzel being a bad guy, I’m totally in.

Her tweets reminded me of a phenomenon that I experienced as a kid but never as an adult, which is watching movies over and over and over again, usually every day, for an extended period of time. Did you guys do this too? Why? Were we that bored? Were we that lacking in new movies to watch? Was there something about our developing brains that required constant repetition? Would we have done this had the Internet been a thing? I have more questions than answers, but here are the four movies I remember watching over and over and over.

Back to the Future- This was the first movie I ever watched on a VCR. I watched it over and over and over, annoyed with how long it took to rewind back to the beginning so I could watch it again. And the scene where Michael J Fox plays the modified guitar and gets blasted across the room? I rewound, replayed, and paused that scene at least 60 times. I had to know how it worked.

Heathers- This was my first “favorite” movie, and god bless my parents for realizing that the R rating was like the buzzing of flies to me. I was obsessed with Heathers, in a way I’ve not been obsessed with anything else. It was just so cool to look at, and even at a young age, I realized that it was smart- smarter than me, in fact. I watched it until I could recite the dialogue along with it, and until I had memorized everyone’s outfits in every scene. I loved studying slightly older females at this age, planning my semi-adulthood, and this movie gave me a lot to look at.

Real Genius- Real Genius does not get enough credit for being one of the first nerd-positive movies to make being a nerd look cool, without being called “Revenge of the Nerds”. It helped that Val Kilmer was the hippest nerd on the planet, and a fox. I watched this movie almost every day for about 8 months. I loved the intrigue, I loved the humor, and I loved that it made kid Emily feel smart.

Young Guns II- I have no explanation for this one. It was not a fantastic movie, but I think I had a Balthazar Getty crush. For one summer during middle school, it was my routine to wake up, do nothing, go into the basement, watch Young Guns II, do more nothing, eat, and then sleep.

I’m sure there are tons more movies I’ve rewatched a thousand times but have forgotten about- like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, for example. But you get the point. Maybe it was a necessary part of development… it was a necessary part of my development, at least. When you’re young and your hormones and your body are changing so fast you cannot keep up, perhaps you need a bit of repetition and comfort to keep you grounded. Perhaps I was working on finding my own personality in these movies, trying to figure out who I was by examining the things that kept me the most engaged. I see bits of myself in each of these movies now, and bits of these movies so deeply in my emotional DNA that I cannot figure out what came first.

Or more likely, it was boredom.

McDonalds thought it might be fun to have people on Twitter tell their McDStories. They thought wrong.

Next time you can’t sleep, remember: New Mexico is growing.

A new post from me at xoJane about my love/hate relationship with party girls.

No. No, Mickey.

I watched Drew Peterson: Untouchable, and though it did a great job of being a campy Lifetime movie and really taking the piss out of Drew Peterson, who seems like the world’s douchiest dickbag, I also feel a bit creepy that to me, watching at home, Drew never once seemed menacing. He seemed like a joke. I don’t know if I wanted him to seem menacing, but I don’t love the idea of turning this murderer, and the two women he murdered, into a campy joke. There are still four kids who are parentless because their dad is a douchebag murderer. MURDERER. I thought I’d be at least a bit creeped out by the movie, but instead I just giggled and then felt weird about giggling. And not to be a downer on what was obviously a silly movie, but domestic violence is something that can happen to anyone, and perhaps we shouldn’t make the perpetrators so cartoonish. Or maybe my reaction is weird… I can’t tell anymore.

I love all these pictures from Sundance, but this one especially.

The first ever live episode of The Indoor Kids is up today! Kumail couldn’t make it, so I hosted with Matt Mira, and it was a lot of fun and a little bit scary for the non-performer that I am! Hooray!

I don’t know what is weirder- that Wayne Coyne is working with Ke$ha, or that she has so much cocaine just lying around.

2 Live Crew is reuniting! Who says gangsta rap can’t have nostalgia tours?

The racially coded language of the presidential candidates, over at Sociological Images.

A new amazing video from Nathan Barnatt, featuring lots of fun people! Watch!

A new Parks and Rec recap from me over at Vulture! I loved pausing the episode to read all the things Leslie Knope is “pro”!

An advice columnist decides that women are slick bitches made for cheating and that men are hapless ignorant idiots who never know when their ladies are stepping out.

Please do not click on this link to see what Beavis and Butthead would look like if they were real. Please. Please don’t.

PROJECT RUNWAY ALL STARS!

We get it Chloe, you’re challenging the notion of beauty. Wait, you know what? I don’t get it. I’ve never gotten Chloe Sevigny. (Note: this is not an issue of her being gender-bendy- I love that shit. I’m just not a fan of the smug look on her face, and the tone of the whole photo shoot.)

It’s interesting that even though it’s called self-esteem, for a good chunk of your life, it actually comes from somewhere other than your self. Children don’t even know what their strengths are, how are they to know that those strengths are how they’re supposed to feel good? When I was about 13, I remember the shift from thinking that what my parents thought about me mattered, to what my friends thinking about me being incredibly important. I also remember that since I wasn’t yet ready to rely on my own talents and personality, I dyed my hair a lot, and used that as my spine, a move that has the added benefit of shielding you from rejection- if they don’t like you, it’s the hair they’re rejecting, not you.

The one thing I did realize while working with kids is that false praise is only harmful. I would see families come in with a 13 year old terror of a child, and the parents would literally praise the kid for making a basket when he angrily balled up his progress notes and threw them away during a session. If you praise everything, you praise nothing, and the kid learns that it doesn’t matter if he tries. On top of that, when he gets a taste of the world, a place that doesn’t reward you for nothing, he gets incredibly frustrated, and that I understand. (I use “he” because I mostly worked with male clients, but obviously this applies to females too.) A lot of my time with teenage clients was spent helping them to cope with the idea that the world only rewards hard work, and even if it doesn’t reward you for your hard work, that’s not a reason to give up. You keep trying because it feels good. (This itself is hard work.) A lot of my time with parents was spent teaching them to praise the good they see, not everything they see, and teaching them to not constantly berate the bad.

Because of all this, I loved this article in Washington Post, which I found on Neatorama. It’s about how teachers are starting to learn that praising their students constantly isn’t helping.

From the article:

“We used to think we could hand children self-esteem on a platter,” Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck said. “That has backfired.”

Dweck’s studies, embraced in Montgomery schools and elsewhere, have found that praising children for intelligence — “You’re so clever!” — also backfires. In study after study, children rewarded for being smart become more likely to shy away from hard assignments that might tarnish their star reputations.

But children praised for trying hard or taking risks tend to enjoy challenges and find greater success. Children also perform better in the long term when they believe that their intellect is not a birthright but something that grows and develops as they learn new things.

Praising a kid who has not successfully completed a task by saying “at least you tried” or “those teachers are so wrong” is only reinforcing the idea that you don’t need to succeed, you can just sit right here and be awesome without trying. And that isn’t helping anyone become awesome.

It’s a great article and suggests a lot of other good reading, so if you’re a parent, a teacher, or just a person who likes to think about stuff like this, dig in. And please understand, what I’m referring to is different than “Unconditional Positive Regard”, a term that refers to accepting a child no matter what he says or does. Acceptance does not always mean praise, and I do think that you need to let your own children know that you’ll always be their parent no matter what they do. But a parent is not a best friend, and not a cheerleader. I’ve seen firsthand what can happen when you don’t let a kid learn what he/she is good at, and it ain’t pretty.

What the hell is going on with the girls in upstate NY?

Ezra Miller, star of We Need to Talk About Kevin, has had “many gay moments”. Myyyyyy myyyyyy myyyyyyyyy…..

The guy who left roses and cognac on Edgar Allan Poe’s grave for years hasn’t shown up in two years, so he’s been symbolically declared dead. Somehow, this really bums me out.

I’ve never seen The Biggest Loser (no judgement, just hadn’t crossed my DVR), but this study reinforces my concerns about the show- that it reinforces the idea that we’re only okay with fat people when they are trying REALLY HARD not to be fat. Is this show the reason that some of my thicker friends won’t eat in public, hoping that people will silently approve if they see that they’re working towards being more palatable by not eating?

Game of Thrones megapost! Come for the pic of Martin and his wife, stay for everything else!

Apparently, chicken mcnuggets look like the ooze that was in the tub in Ghostbusters 2. “IT TRIED TO EAT OSCAR!!” In other news, I’m never eating another chicken mcnugget.

Brand new Indoor Kids episode with Chris “Nerdist” Hardwick as our guest! Bonus- here are pics from our first ever live show, where Matt Mira filled in for Kumail, who was stuck filming until 10pm.

Please enjoy CatGifs. I know I do.

Nerd rapper Adam WarRock dropped Kumail’s name in a song! Listen up, third verse!

Letterman booker Eddie Brill removed from his position after giving an interview in which he says some questionable things about lady comics and then getting into a flame war in the comment section. No comment.

I really liked this post I saw about one audience member’s experience of Harmontown, a monthly show at NerdMelt. That’s all.

Lord of the Rings nail art. Dig it.