A great week on MEL if you enjoy reading about just how weird the world is. Want to shock your friends with your knowledge of “Big Areolae Energy” or the online community for guys who want to get pregnant by other men? We’ve got you covered, and that’s not even the half of it.
But first, here’s the relatively normal stuff…
For tears: The world lost a legend this week in Stephen Hillenburg, creator of SpongeBob SquarePants. Miles Klee wrote why SpongeBob’s lack of manliness is actually what makes him an icon. And while it breaks our hearts to hear that fuccbois are fed up with being called “fuccbois,” let’s face it, they have it coming.
For lols: Here’s what the plot of Love, Actually sounds like based solely on tweets about the movie (trust me, you’ll lol). And if you don’t laugh while reading this takedown of online retail “gifts for dad” lists, we’re doing something terribly wrong.
For help: Be a better uncle. Don’t be “that guy” — we’re looking at you Nick — in your open office. Start eating, drinking and dosing your way to a less-inflamed lifestyle.
And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming of Mozart’s best fart jokes, Aquaman’s inability to shit properly, “retweet slaves” and much, much more.
Must Reads
“Inside the Mpreg Scene: The Men Who Fantasize About Other Men Getting Them Pregnant”
It’s not just women who get baby fever — there are guys who really want to get knocked up, too. They’re called “Mpregs,” an almost entirely gay community of “carriers,” “seeders” and “neutral observers” who have found each other on a forum called Mpreg Central. And while it may seem like an odd fetish for men to have, male pregnancy is a lot closer to becoming reality than you might think. READ MORE
“The Future of Robots Won’t Be Like ‘The Terminator’ — It’ll Probably Be Worse”
Here’s the good news: There are no T-800s that need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle and no Skynets becoming self-aware. The bad news: While we won’t see the plot of T2 come to life any time soon, machines are slowly, methodically destroying our economy, our relationships and our sense of self. Tim Grierson spoke with Maxim Pozdorovkin, the documentarian behind HBO’s The Truth About Killer Robots, about the robo-pocalypse that’s already here, and an eerily empty future where we don’t even remember what it’s like to be human. READ MORE
“An Oral History of ‘Mortal Kombat’”
Few titles play such a defining role in gaming history as Mortal Kombat. It was as innovative as it was violent, points that served as catnip to kids and a headache to protective mothers everywhere. Hear from the actors who played Luke Cage and Sonya Blade, project directors who helped build the game and the journalists, bloggers and obsessives who propelled it into legendary status. READ MORE
“Where Are the Male Weed Thots of Instagram?”
Since landmark rulings in states like Colorado, California, and now gloriously, Michigan, legal cannabis companies have been skirting Facebook’s ad policies against weed-vertising by using influencers to promote their products. Mostly, those influencers have been hot women — weed thots, as they’ve come to be known. In an industry so thoroughly dominated by men, however, you might think there’d be more male weed thots in your feed. Here’s why you’d be wrong. READ MORE
Five Things We Learned This Week
- A bottle of Aperol makes for a much better boozy holiday gift than a bottle of whatever the recipient’s favorite alcohol is. Bartender Haley Hamilton argues that anyone can go out and buy a bottle of vodka. But cocktail “modifiers” like Aperol or Campari are considered splurges because they cost a lot relative to how many drinks call for them — making them a perfect gift for the burgeoning mixologist.
- Ambergris, a highly sought after substance by perfumers and harvested from whale poop, goes for $10,000 and $20,000 per pound. That’s the sort of knowledge gleaned from this Nick Leftley take on why the filmmakers behind Aquaman should’ve let Jason Momoa shit like a whale in his hard-to-poop-in skintight suit. And on a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being facts from this piece that will make you dry heave, that one’s like a 2.
- When Wall Street came out in 1987 stockbrokers didn’t look like the slick-haired antagonist, Gordon Gekko — they looked, well, like normal guys. But director Oliver Stone wanted Gekko to look like a powerful slimeball, so costume designer Ellen Mirojnick used Lakers’ coach Pat Riley — who, in her eyes, “exuded power and elegance” — as inspiration for Gekko’s signature hairstyle. And now, that infamous haircut is making a comeback.
- Dudes are fucking terrible at writing about sex. That’s the only conclusion one can draw from this year’s list of entries for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award, which, unsurprisingly, is made up solely of male writers. From referring to vaginas as “pleasure caves” to bashing you in the face repeatedly with, uh, descriptive prose about jizz, it becomes quite clear that romance writing is something best left to the ladies.
- Oversized areolae are currently having a moment on Twitter. “Big Areolae Energy” may not be reaching the heights that Big Dick Energy hit, but judging from the response, what is clear is that we might need to all reconsider what ideal beauty is — because Madonna-sized nipples isn’t it.
“Big areola energy” is something i’m 100% here for
— Aaron (@abake6) July 16, 2018
The Week in Quotes
For anyone who’s ever seen Amadeus, you know that the Milos Foreman masterpiece about the prodigious, yet ultimately tragic life and death of Mozart portrayed the late composer as a sexual deviant. But how do we know for sure? Easy: He loved telling scat jokes. Quinn Myers talked to leading Mozart scholars about the composer’s love of all things ass, and while you will laugh, keep in mind that it’s all much funnier in the original German.
“Retweet slaves” are exactly what they sound like: Subs on Twitter who get off on promoting the accounts and building the followers of their dommes. Cassidy Dawn Graves interviewed a couple of these slaves — after they got permission to talk to her from their dommes, mind you — about this wild sub-genre of the findom community to find out how this symbiotic domme-sub relationship works.
“Badonka dudes” are just like everyone else you’ll find putting in a little extra time in the gym, with one visibly obvious caveat: Their workouts are tailored to embrace the upward trend of building butt. And not only are they reaping the sociological rewards of having a killer tuchus, they’re also reaping big-ass physical benefits in other places, too.
The Weekend Binge
We’ll see your argument about Die Hard and raise you these five other films. Sure, they’re not exactly Christmas movies in the traditional sense — at least not in the way of Miracle on 34th Street or A Christmas Story. But Christmas definitely looms large in them. I mean, after all, Gizmo in Gremlins was a father’s Christmas present to his son, even if the rest of the movie is a horror-comedy about an army of evil, possessed Gizmos taking over that father and son’s hometown. You can try to fight us about it. But remember, we have John McClane, a bunch of Gremlins and even Edward Scissorhands on our side.
Jeff Gross
Jeff Gross is MEL’s senior editor for social media and content marketing. His daily ICYMI column, which chronicles all things meta on the site, is the quickest way to catch up on MEL, and the funniest thing you’ll read all day. Follow him on Twitter.
