Benetton

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Skin Deep

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Skin Deeper

so what's the point of me showing you these videos about how race and color are perceived and what they mean in the context of modern society? why would i show you videos about why race is a social construct rather than a scientific fact? why is racism in gaming important? why is there a double standard about hollywood racelifiting, and why is it a necessary evil? this. this is why

i don't usually do this....

but peep this post on net neutrality from the oatmeal 

"Net Neutrality" is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) November 10, 2014

 
*Source: Consumerist. 



 
Source: Washington Post via Netflix 





well said, the oatmeal, but sadly we lose because thing #1 runs washington. anybody tired of big money buying our politicians: wolf-pac.com lets work to get an amendment to the constitution guaranteeing free and fair elections free from the influence of big money donors.


quick sidenote:
i was about to take a picture of myself before my workout to post on the instagram and.... i just.... couldn't do it. i need to get it right for my life. i mean, how am i supposed to be the the warrior of righteousness, battling against all things uncool if i look like sammo hung?

then again, i's get to have bad ass fights like this

the facebook drewniverse

the drewniverse is now on facebook!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! check out these sweet ass new pics i made  for it!



oh yeah, and here's a link to the page

#RQOD: the don't be scurred edition

walla walla wang walla wah, woh na na ney africa...

what with people all over the country freaking out about africa and people who've been there, i gotta ask (this might be a twofer)

1. did you know that there is presently a confrimed ebola case in only 1 more african country than there are in states in america? (the 3 highlighted countris in that picture; NY and TX have confirmed cases)
2. people do realize africa's a continent, not  a country right?

random question blah blah #rqod

sometimes i look at the 4 or 5 prematurely grey hairs i've gotten over the last three years and i wonder what the point of it all is. so i ask you guys, was all the stress and the sleepless nights and the weight gain really worth it? what do you guys think?

900 FREE GAMES?!? IS THIS REAL LIFE!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

that's not a typo. you can drop everything you're doing RIGHT NOW and play around 900 classic arcade titles in your web browser even if you don't have the time to DIY your laptop into the ultimate home arcade! the good people over at the internet archive have along with the folks at JSMESS taken on the task of preserving these classic titles for posterity, and most of them are in good working order! all you need to get your dig dug or galaga on is:

• a computer;
• an internet connection; and
• the desire to be awesome and not a n00b

by virtue of being in the drewniverse right now you meet 2 of the qualifications. the only question is, do you dare to be awesome and not a n00b? i know i do. for the non-n00bs, in order to run the gmaes in browser just click the "run" link under the pic in the top right corner.

right there

now if you'll excuse me, i have to go.... uhh...  water my dog.... *goes to the internet arcade*

ps, here's the link for the real mvps

A cold day in November

so i've spent a good portion of the past week talking to voters and candidates, and i've learned something important. what i've learned is that regardless of what most people's beliefs, politics, pet issues and party affiliation, most people are decent, upstanding citizens. for the most part my interactions with the voting public and the candidates for office has been pleasant or at least reasonably non-vitriolic.

see, the thing about the word "most" is that it demands a "some". and the some were the blithering idiots that believe whatever Bill O'Reilly tells 'em to believe. or worse, the ones that take Pat Robertson seriously. a guy who said this about haiti after the earthquake hit and all this shit.

pat robertson, seriously....

now, this is america, and people in america have the right to belive whatever stupid thing they want, because 'murica. but when people don't know facts, when they vote some unimportant pet issue over their needs, an they do so based on the tripe they hear from false prophets and agenda spouting talking heads, i gotta draw the line. see, the drewniverse isn't just about enriching people's lives, it's about fighting ignorance for the good of the drewninites!

you're welcome

so let me tell you about the one guy:

drewniverse shorts: when your lady wants to cut her hair...

when your lady wants to cut her hair, she'll make her case:

and you, being a good guy, will listen:


she'll say it's for







because shes bored




and you'll say, "but you'll get bored with it cut",


becuse you know her and it's not that she wants the cut JUST because "it's cute", it's that it's new. and she'll say, "then i'll grow it back"

perfectly reasoned

and you'll see, "i wouldn't like it" because you think she looks fine how she is

or you'll flat out say

and she'll begrudgingly concede the point

and you'll feel bad because no matter what she does you'll be fine with it.  and all you want is for her to be happy

my impassioned unnecessary plea to the creators of "Dear White People" (I'M BAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCKKKK!)

Dear DWP, 
I would like to begin by pointing out a few things about me: 

1.  I'm a 27-y-o black graduate of a PWI law school. As such nobody appreciates what this movie stands for more than I do. 
2. I haven't been this excited about an indie film since "Black Dynamite". I'm glad black filmmakers are still producing quality work, at least outside the Hollywood mainstream. 
3. The closest theater showing DWP is 6 hrs from where I live. SIX HOURS!! (I live in Charlotte, NC making D.C. the closest city where the movie is showing) 

Which brings me to the reason I'm writing: PLEASE BRING "Dear White People" TO NORTH CAROLINA!!!!!! Bring it to Durham! Bring it to Raleigh! Bring it to Greensboro! BRING IT TO CHARLOTTE!!! I guarantee there is a strong enough market in any of these tobacco road towns to cover whatever the expenses of opening there will be. Further, if the purpose of this movie is to shine a light anew on the absurd ideas about race held by the white and privileged, I can think of no market in America more in the dark than this one. 

In short, North Carolina needs, nay, deserves "Dear White People". Plus it would make my Girlfriend very happy. Very happy indeed. So pretty please, with sugar on top, open DWP in NC. Love, Drew Everyday

(minutes later after exploring their FB page)

Dear DWP,
Upon further investigation, it has come to my attention that "Dear White People" is indeed opening in several theaters across NC, some of which are in my home town. I would like to thank you for answering my letter with action before I had even penned it. So much for CPT, amirite? Thank you, again for bringing DWP to NC where Drew to see at the AMC in the QC. You've made my Girlfriend very happy. Love, Drew Everyday

blackwashing hollywood and hypocrites

I'm in a terse mood. Wanna know why? Well, there are very few things that really huffle my puffs and this is a list of them: 1) stupid shit; 2) law school shit; 3) racist shit; and 4) “even though God made my body in his image, men in nightgowns tell me that it’s a gross and evil thing therefor I find my natural human body related urges icky” shit (or puritanical views on sexy time for short). That’s it. You steer clear of those categories and you find a very happy and agrreable man of every hour, drew everyday. But then I go and hear about the “controversy” over the casting of Michael Balthasar Jordan (I assume that’s what the “B” stands for), one of the finest young actors not named Jonah in all of Hollywood, as the human torch in fox’s Fantastic 4 reboot.

seriously, the fat kid from "superbad" just turned 30 and has 2 oscar nods already. he's basically on route to be this generation's robert de niro.

Seriously. People are pissed. Why? Glad you asked, and the reason for the misplaced nerd rage took a hard left right into one of my puff huffler zones, then swerved in time to side swipe anothers bloated gas guzzling minitank of a car. You see, this is a fundamentally different issue then the rage over batfleck or superman murder. Those two internet poo-ricanes (tm) were due to questions over ben affleck’s ability to pull off being batman (he can, but much like Clooney was, is too… too… who he is for the cowl) and for the sheer… just un-supermanlikeness of neck snapping a fellow kryptonian. I mean superman will kill a… giant bug monster from the center of the earth, or rip the head clean off an unkillable cyborg (hell, he banished doomsday to the end of time, so he’s no saint) but straight up bare hands murder of a humanoid form his home planet? No. just no.

no.

NO.

Before I go completely on this sidetrack like another, faster locomotive is heading toward me- hold on a sec…

stop it.

Ok, so before I go off on this sidetrack any further like my engine gave out on lap 63, what makes the Michael Bosworth Jordan human torch outcry different? Well, as this article puts it, and I’m paraphrasing, “because white nerds are racist little pricks”. That’s right. The outrage has nothing to do with Michael Benvolio Jordan’s capability of pulling off the complexities of Johnny Storm (b/c, c’mon, being a hotheaded manchild requires Shakespearean depth and character dev skills) as a character.  It’s just because J-Torch is  a fire elemental and we all know fire elementals are white people. Or at least that’s how they drew him in the comic. But there’s a reason that stormfire johnny is  white in the comic… it was first printed inthe sixties. The first black superhero wasn’t invented until a later issue of the Fantastic 4 series.

you know he's black because it says so in his name. BP's a BA BTW...

So that first piece of rage inducing back lash is the easy one. Hell, it's the type of low hanging fruit that has also seen outrage over Heimdall’s movie casting (a decidedly black Idris Elba) or Nick Fury’s (an even blacker Samuel L. Jackson), both traditionally white characters. And you know what? They crushed it in those roles. Hell, Samuel L. “and the L is Motherfuckin” Jackson was so great as the leader of shield, marvel retconned the character to look like him!

who you callin a ret-con, muthafucka?

The second rage inducing backlash (the one they swerved into earlier, remember?) is the other stupid reasons people shit on these fine actor’s being cast in these roles: the purist reasons. These are stupid. Why? Because they’re excuses for people to be racist without feeling like dickholes. The purist reasons range from “but the character was always white before, so casting a nonwhite person in the role ruins it for me” to the equally annoying (and this is fantastic four specific) “but how can he and sue still be sibs if he’s black and she’s white?”. Those arguments seem reasonable until you hear the third, which pulls the sheet off the alleged unracism and reveals the pointier hooded sheet underneath. The third purist argument is, “but I can’t get invested in the character now, because they were white in my head”

this basically

All of those sentiments are coded. They all imply a level of discomfort with black people akin to that of finding your dog has been replaced with another dog of the same breed, but in a different colorway. It’s like yeah, it’s a chow, but you don’t like it now because it looks different than the chow you knew. Bad analogy aside, this has even been used when the character in question was always black. If a character is being adapted from print to film and is belived, white people will often assume the character is white, even if the source material explicitly describes them a different way.

**ahem**

And to all you contrarians who are loading up your, “but just because SOME people said racist shit doesn’t mean EVERY person who doesn’t like these casting choices is racist” cannons to counterstrike, SHUT UP! There are people who dislike Obama for policy reasons, but that doesn’t excuse the inherent bigotry of the birther crowd and the secret muslim coalition. Not to mention the “I’m uncomfortable with the idea of a black president” contingent.

Now, the worst part about these racists and puri-racists is that they’re hypocrits for shitting on the ‘racelifting’ in Hollywood. Oh, you wonder how? Well then, you, you.. drewninite jerk, for the first time in drewniversal history, join me on page 2 and I’ll prove it…

shut up in my bones

bones are important, man.

stay with me. have you ever really thought about them? beyond them being hard or hurting a lot if they break i mean. have you? bones are why you have a form!! they hold you up and let you walk and stuff. they do other stuff, too. they enable you to eat and start digestion (teeth are bones, too, you know) they hold your muscles in place so you can, like, have mobility. they make stuff taste better (the difference between unctuous and flavorful stock and blah di blah broth? stock is made with the bones of the beastie). even bugs have bones (they call them "exoskeletons" because they wear them on the outside because bugs have no shame). and the most important thing bones do?

star in noir style mysteries?

no, they make blood! thought it was the heart that did that? wrong again Bob! the heart is like the head of person city's blood distribution ring. it moves the product through the veins and what not, but it has a supplier, and the supplier lives in the bones. that would be the marrow. see, if the heart is Frank Lucas, and the blood is blue magic, then the marrow is the vietnamese general that grew the opium it was made of.

And that would make Richie Roberts a heart attack (get it? because he was the arresting officer?!)

the bone marrow is very important. it's what makes bone in food taste good, and it's what gives stock it's oomph. also it's wht gives your body blood, and  more importantly, white blood cells. without white blood cells the body can't fight infection, and if you can;t fight infection, you can't, like, live through stuff. you need to be able to live through stuff. i mean it! how terrible would it be if everytime you got a sniffle you had to fear for your life? that's how important bones are, they give you the ability to live your life and live through the stuff that wants to take your life from the inside. 

and the cool thing is we all have that superpower!

.....

ok, so i lied. most of us have that superpower, but there are those of us who don't. there are people in this world that for one reason or another lose the ability to produce new healthy blood cells to fight off infections that might do us in. and you know what? as superheroes, it is our duty to help those who cannot help themselves. we have to give our powers to those who have lost the ability to use their own. that's what wolverine would do. remember that scene in the first [read: the good] X-men movie? when rogue was latched into Magneto's "turn-all-the-people-into-mutants-but-it'll-kill-the-person-acting-as-the-battery-so-i'll-trap-a-teenager-who-can-steal-powers-into-it-in-my-place-because-the-nazi's-killed-my-mom" machine and died as a result, wolverine went and did the one thing he knew could save her: touched her so she could steal his healing power to come back to life. 

shown: life giving. not shown: what it looks like (fuckin)

that's what we are: a bunch of wolverine's. we all have a healing factor shut up in our bones. and we need to be willing to give our powers to those who have lost the ability to use there's. that's why i encourage everyone who is able to sign up to the National Marrow Donor Program as a bone marrow donor. it costs you nothing but a cheek swab and it could save someone's life, man. you could be somebody's personal wolverine!

not a butt cheek swab, you perv....

look, i know it's a scary proposition. donating a piece of you to somebody else, somebody you've never met no less, doesn't sound appealing. it sounds painful and invasive. i know man. when i signed up i had the same thoughts. but you know what outweighed all of my fears? the idea that just maybe one day there would be a part of me out there saving the next michael jackson, or the next bill gates. somebody might have leukemia and need a marrow transplant and that may be the person that cures AIDS or cancer. somebody might need chemo and require a transplant to repair their immune system afterwards, and that person may go on to invent time travel, or may negotiate peace in the middle east. hell, you may just save somebody's mom or dad, brother or sister, son or daughter, and they may go on to just lead a normal life. and that? that's worth more than any fear i had. that outweighs all of it.

i don't really know how to close this one out, so i'll just leave you with this image that pretty much says it all.

any questions, bub?

the resurrection of the RQOD

pictured: 40-year-old men

With 2 songs in the billboard top 10 at the same time last year (including a #1 song) and a couple of grammys, is it safe to say The Neptunes are the hottest producer in the game right now?

The Hunt for Red October

so the good (no pun intended) people at NIKE finally caved to the incessant ranting and raving by incessant ranter and raver and professional full grown baby Kanye West and made the Air Yeezy II "Red October" available to the public: a sudden and surprising phenomenon which lasted all of about 11 minutes. see, the shoes which yeezy had spent the better part of 2013 shouting about incoherently at radio and tv interviewers had achieved  a status that every product not designed for McDonald's style mass production lusts for: they had become a white whale. an urban legend. a unicorn. a sort of holy grail for every sneakerhead, taste maker, and twitter teenage millionaire to fawn over. they were to the shoe canoodler what, say, "Nintendo World Championships '91" is to the retrogamer, or Action Comics #1 is to the comic collector: a piece of fandomonium trumped up by the real thing i want to talk about here: artificial scarcity.

which makes the Red October worse than action comics #1 as unlike the Yeezy, it was printed in 1938 with ink made from black people and whale infant blubber.

what artificial scarcity does is take something that's is actually common/easy to produce/super inexpensive and by withholding large quantities of it (like OPEC does with oil) or only making a relatively small number of product (like holofoil pokemon cards) drive up the price, or, as is the case with this particular shoe spike peoples desire by making it unavailable for no reason whatsoever. like the McRib. NIKE clearly did this with the red october. let's look at the case a little more closely. 

artists depiction of the red october

NIKE collabs with YEEZY on the air YEEZY. they only make about 3000 pairs and sell them at $225. they make like $800,000 on them (according to kanye) (they couldn't have made more than $675,000 because that's how math works). BIG SUCCESS! YAY! COCAINE SHOWERS FOR EVERYONE! the resale value on the air Yeezy tops $1000. so because of the success and obvious demand demonstrated by the resale value, NIKE commissions the air YEEZY 2 and sells them for $245. however they (strangely) push back the release schedule for the shoe's signature colorway, the "Red October". YEEZY then does what he does best: complain about all the success he isn't having!

that's what he's best known for right? all the not success? right?

he goes on the breakfast club in ny "why they won't release the red octobers?".  he goes on sway in the morning "WHY THEY WON'Y RELEASE THE RED OCTOBERS?! YOU AIN'T GOT THE ANSWER SWAY!" he goes to england. ENGLAND! "i'm trying to be the next louis vuitton... of shoes, but NIKE won't release the red octobers". this creates a buzz in the fashion world. "why won;t nike release the red octobers? how do they look? where can i buy them? when will they be available?" are all questions you were likely to hear if you perused the sneakerhead sites over the past year. what this does is create a ground swell of deman for a shoe that Nike knew they would not have pressed more than a few thousand of. with millions of people demanding them and only thousands pressed (for pennies, btw) they could charge a factory direct price of $245.  that's a brand new XBOX 360 with kinect and watch_dogs!

i DO have a birthday coming up...

and the final piece to the false scarcity puzzle? have a cool person seen in it. like macklemore at nye!now all the stans are drooling on their eminem cds and hair bleach, b/c the unicorn is real and maybe, just maybe the great unicorn masters will let them stroke it's mane for a few minutes (you don't wanna know what it did with the horn...). then suddenly a tweet announces that they are available, and 11 minutes later artificial scarcity proves it effectiveness again. (hell they were on ebay and hour later and going for upwards of $16,000,000.00!!!!!!!!!!)

above: macklemore just despising all the fame and success rap has brought him.

i guess the greater point i'm trying to make is i heard the rib sandwich was coming back on tuesday!!!!!! sign a bruhva up for that!!!!!!!!!!