Think you got that fry knowledge?!

We all know what the real Coney Island is.

If it's not Vernor's, it's not ginger ale.

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And even if you've never been to Massachusetts, you know how to make a Boston Cooler.

Vernors. Breyers vanilla. Deliciousness.

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THIS is the real Coney Island.

Get with the plan, New York.

Flickr photo by Michigan Municipal League / mml.org / Via Flickr: michigancommunities

A Coney is a dog. A deliciously drunken Koegel's dog.

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Tyler Hoechlin, Wyatt Russell, director Richard Linklater, Glen Powell, and Forrest Vickery on the set of Everybody Wants Some!!

Van Redin / Paramount Pictures

When Richard Linklater was just starting what would become the landmark achievement of his filmmaking career — the 12 year–spanning Boyhood, covering the life of the same child from first to twelfth grade — he also had an idea to make a movie about the moment that comes right after high school ends and college is about to begin.

Ironically, it took him the length of the Boyhood shoot to get the movie made.

"Even as I was shooting the end of Boyhood, I told my two young actors, who are [playing] new college students, 'You know, I have another movie — it begins, like, right here,'" Linklater told BuzzFeed News in his Austin, Texas, office in mid-March.

Everybody Wants Some!! — officially titled with two enthusiastic exclamation points — starts on Aug. 28, 1980, as incoming college freshman Jake (Glee's Blake Jenner) arrives at the off-campus house he will be sharing with his fellow teammates on his university's top-rated baseball team. Jake gets wrapped up in the camaraderie of a cadre of Linklaterian bros who most often go by only their last names, guys like McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin), the cocksure senior; Finnegan (Glen Powell), the carefree philosopher; and Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), the zen stoner. Jake does carve out some time to romance Beverly (Zoey Deutch) — a self-possessed theater major who represents the only female character of any consequence in the film — but the vast majority of Everybody Wants Some!! is spent chronicling Jake's introduction to the hard-partying, easygoing lifestyle of the college jock.

Blake Jenner and Temple Baker in Everybody Wants Some!!

Van Redin / Paramount Pictures

It's a life Linklater knows intimately well. Everybody Wants Some!! is one of the most directly autobiographical movies of his career, based on his own experiences as a college baseball player in the late 1970s, before an injury ended his athletic career and ultimately steered his life toward filmmaking. "You had all this freedom," he said. "That's what the movie's about: what to do with all the new adult freedom you have even though you're only 18."

Cinema has long since become the now 55-year-old director and screenwriter's abiding obsession. His office, a 10-minute drive from downtown Austin, sits on the grounds of the old airport that's been converted into a film production facility, a labor of love that he spent his entire professional career developing. "It's our little mini-studio," Linklater said with a grin. The double-wide trailer that houses his office is so packed with oversize, European editions of classic film posters — 8 ½, Straw Dogs, The Quiet Man, The 400 Blows — that there is no room for Everybody Wants Some!!'s modestly sized one sheet, so it leans instead against a nearby wall.

But talking with Linklater about his latest film, it’s clear that he still holds a firm grasp of the pleasures and problems of being young. It’s a topic he’s been exploring since his second film, 1993’s Dazed and Confused, earned a devoted following for its sprawling portrait of Texas high school students the last day before summer break. Linklater has been calling Everybody Wants Some!! a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed — one of Dazed’s central characters, the long-haired freshman Mitch (Wiley Wiggins), even plays on his school’s baseball team — but he said he never considered making a true sequel to Dazed with the same characters.

“I thought I would have similar mixed feelings about college. But it turned out, once I got into it, I really don't.”

“This [movie] is all about leaving it behind, separating yourself and being new, fresh, not knowing anyone,” he said. “To me, that's what college was. It was getting away from high school. I mean, you can always imagine four years later what all those characters are doing, but in truth, they're all off at different colleges.”

Also, Linklater added with a laugh, “Wiley's, like, 38 years old.”

Besides, Linklater sees some crucial differences between Dazed and Everybody Wants Some!!, starting with his own personal experiences. “Looking back, I think I had more conflicted feelings about high school,” he said. “I thought I would have similar mixed feelings about college. But it turned out, once I got into it, I really don't. That was a really great time.”

And instead of a vast ensemble cutting across the full spectrum of high school demographics — from nerds to mean girls to stoners — Everybody Wants Some!! focuses exclusively on Jake and the time he spends surrounded by like-minded, strapping young men obsessed with sex, sports, and having a good time.

Blake Jenner, Zoey Deutch, and director Richard Linklater on
the set of Everybody Wants Some!!

Van Redin / Paramount Pictures

“College is like that,” Linklater said. “I think it's a little better now; they have a lot of co-ed dorms and stuff. But [for me], college, the gender segregation was pronounced. Even when, say you're in a dining hall, you're still with your guys. To accurately depict that in Jake's world, I just had to realize early on that I was making very much a male movie. I told Zoey Deutch, ‘You have the weight of all young womanhood on your shoulders, through just you.’ But that's kind of how it felt that first weekend. That's just the way it was.”

Linklater wasn’t interested, however, in merely reveling in hedonistic swagger — he wants the audience to understand that that behavior does not happen in a vacuum. “There was something worth examining to me about the way young men who were athletes are treated,” he said. “You could be stupid, not a good student, not an interesting person, but if you're good at sports — our culture's kind of fucked up in this way — we really elevate you. The teacher giving you a C when you should get an F, 'cause they appreciate what you're good at. And no one treats you like a dork. You kind of can't be a dork. You don't get bullied. It enforces this kind of entitlement, and I really wanted to show that. Like, you could be a brilliant prodigy musician, and that doesn't mean you don't get bullied at school.”

Everybody Wants Some!! is not, however, meant to be an indictment of the male college athlete. For one, Linklater believes that most of them also suffer the consequences of living a consequence-free life. “It’s a dark area quite often for the athlete who gets passed over and discarded when they're hurt,” he said. “I thought it was interesting to depict young men before the real world has slapped them [like that]. … Jake's coming in with that [confidence], but he's on the bottom of the totem pole.” Linklater felt the same going into his freshman year. “My team, there were only three freshmen,” he said. “It was a tough year to kind of find your feet. It made for a very humbling, uneven experience.”

Austin Amelio, Tanner Kalina, Forrest Vickery, Tyler Hoechlin, Ryan Guzman in Everybody Wants Some!!

Van Redin / Paramount Pictures

For another, while that entitlement and confidence can be problematic, as Linklater depicts it in the movie, it is also enormously appealing and seductive. “There's something pure about it,” he said. “It's beautiful. It's like watching, like, peacocks or something. Certain animals stroll the earth in a certain way.”

Perhaps because he used to do it himself, Linklater fundamentally does not see that kind of self-conscious preening as worthy of scorn. “I think still some of the funniest guys I was ever around came from that crowd,” he said. “They're business majors, and they're not that creative, they don't read that much. But they were just funny. And so I was trying to capture that. You start off going, These guys seem like jerks. Their first [interactions] are macho, are you going to be tough enough to be one of us tests. But I think you find out fairly soon, hopefully, that they're just kind of acting the role of asshole, but they're not really bad guys. They're not dark-hearted people. They're teammates. … If you ask Brett Favre today, ‘What do you miss?’ He will inevitably say, ‘The guys. Locker room.’ It's just being a part of something. Being on a team.”

That camaraderie takes on a compelling dimension when it comes to the character of Dale, played by newcomer J. Quinton Johnson. Dale is the only black player on the team, but his race never plays a factor in the film — pointedly so, like when the teammates go out to a disco together, and Dale dances with a white woman while some of his white teammates dance with black women.

Director Richard Linklater, Blake Jenner, and J. Quinton Johnson
on the set of Everybody Wants Some!!

Van Redin / Paramount Pictures

For Linklater, the scene speaks to that profound feeling of fellowship he felt with his teammates in college. “Yeah — team first. No big deal,” he said. “We had black girlfriends, white girlfriends. I showed Quinton Johnson my team pictures. We had two brothers on the team. I just kind of explained this was the vibe. There's one point where McReynolds walks up to him and goes, ‘So, brother, what's going on?’ And Dale's free to say, ‘You white motherfucker.’ It was just nothing. We were beyond it. That's how it felt, to be young and idealistic.”

This isn’t just an issue of youthful optimism for Linklater, however. The movie also serves as a subtle generational signpost — a kind of exuberant elegy for a different way of looking at the world. “When people say, ‘Oh, it's an '80s movie’ — no, no, no. It's an '80 movie,” Linklater said. “It was the end of the '70s. Anything that smacked of racism felt so dumb, from a different era. It's pre-Reagan, pre-‘welfare queen.’ Reagan turned the clock back on racism. You know, when Reagan announces his presidential candidacy in Philadelphia, Mississippi — as we know, the home of the [Freedom Summer] murders — talking about states' rights, he's declaring: We're going backwards. And they did! Between that and the Moral Majority, there we are today.”

The topic animated the famously laid-back filmmaker like nothing else. “It's been depressing in my adult life to see things — things you would've thought, Oh well, this is minutes away from not being an issue anymore — get worse,” he said. “Pot was going to be legal any second. To see the ‘Just Say No’ drug war of the '80s was like, Whoa, just make it legal and chill out about that.”

“It's been depressing in my adult life to see things — things you would've thought, Oh well, this is minutes away from not being an issue anymore — get worse.”

To be clear, the politics in Everybody Wants Some!! are, at best, subtext — Linklater wanted his film to be about that blissful time before life becomes freighted with the pesky realities of adult life. (Linklater cut a scene in which Jake and Beverly agree they won’t be voting for Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. “It will be a good DVD extra,” he said.)

But he may not be quite done working out his feelings about the Reagan era either. “I think I have a mid-twenties, '80s underground movie, you know, what that was like to be so anti-establishment,” he said. That would likely come after a kids movie he’s currently writing “about being about 8 or 9 years old during the Space Age — specific to the moon landing.”

It’s all part of Linklater’s enduring project to track the small-yet-meaningful progression of life in its different stages. “I've checked a lot of boxes by now,” he said with a chuckle. “High school, college. Boyhood. The Before movies. I've covered a lot of personal ground. I've been so lucky to be able to do that.”

Someone make these two the godparents of this child, please.

Deorick and Dennis Williams are two brothers whose story went viral when they visited a newborn in the hospital after receiving texts from an unknown number.

Deorick Williams

And now, the story has become so huge that Jimmy Kimmel invited the two on his late night show to be interviewed.

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Kimmel saw the story on Facebook and wanted to get to the bottom of the whole ordeal.

ABC / Via youtube.com

He asked ~hard-hitting~ questions and the guys charmingly responded.

ABC / Via youtube.com

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Take a deep breath.

Everybody is. There are a million ways to fuck up, fuck yourself, and get fucked when it comes to doing (or not doing) your taxes.

Don't panic. We spoke to a few tax experts to help answer your most stressful, last-minute tax questions.

Comedy Central

Be careful, though: you can lose a lot of money by simply clicking the wrong box in TurboTax.

Don't rush it. Be as careful and vigilant as possible when doing your own taxes. Re-read things that are confusing and ask a *real adult* if something doesn't make sense.

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*Clings to toilet bowl for dear life*

If you've had it, you know food poisoning is the goddamn worst.

Universal

Maybe you were at a friend's house, when suddenly your stomach gargled and you violently threw up all over their mom's couch.

NBC

Perhaps it was Thanksgiving when dinner rebelled against you, and you turned your grandma's toilet into a shit-stained Jackson Pollock painting.

Power Plunger / Via youtube.com

Maybe you were betrayed by your fish tacos, and you spent the entire night hugging the toilet bowl while fishy pieces erupted from your mouth.

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Bryan Roper, a true iconoclast.

A star was born.

Tech conferences are usually dull, Banana Republic–dominated affairs. This guy came onstage and immediately stole the show.

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Nothing to see here, just bleeding from my vagina.

When you know it's coming:

Twitter: @badg4lrihanna

When you don't know why you're crying:

ABC / Via Twitter: @gypsykilla

When you're actually a little relieved:

Maritsa Patrinos / BuzzFeed

When the cramps kick in and you're expected to do things:

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“Have a nice life, asshole.”

We hope you love the products we recommend! Just so you know, BuzzFeed may collect a small share of sales from the links on this page.

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Why yes, I did wear heels all day without murdering someone!

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We hope you love the products we recommend! Just so you know, BuzzFeed may collect a small share of sales from the links on this page.

So we did the work for you by looking at reviews for literally hundreds of pairs of heels. We narrowed it down to some of the most positively reviewed heels we could find and made this list. Bonus: they're all under $100!

Ready, set, shop!

This metallic gold pair with a chunky heel.

Get them here for $75.

us.topshop.com

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This is 2016.

If you're over the age of 13 or 14, then you probably have no idea who Dove Cameron is. If you're a teen, then you know that she's popular as hell. She's on some Disney Channel called "The Descendants."

Cool.

Monkey Business Images Ltd / Getty Images

It's... something...

And by something I mean "nice gowns" but its been completely stripped of it's original pro-ho intent!

Monkey Business Images Ltd / Getty Images

For example, the lyrics have been changed from "You gotta rub me the right way" to "You gotta ask me the right way."

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It’s time to crown the regional winners. Who will win the pop music, celebrity, TV and movies, and stuff brackets?

Only eight things remain in '90s March Madness. It's now time to declare our regional champions!

Jen Lewis/BuzzFeed

All regional finalists are either 1 or 2 seeds, with the exception of 9 seeded Clueless which upset 1 seed Titanic in Round 2 Clueless continued its Cinderella run by blowing out 5 seed The Simpsons in the Sweet Sixteen.

BuzzFeed

And, unfortunately, not even a retweet from the Backstreet Boys could hold off NSYNC. Does Britney have a better shot in the Elite Eight?

BuzzFeed

Voting starts now and ends Friday morning at 10 a.m. ET. May the orange VHS tapes be ever in your favor!

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The rebooted show is back on the BBC in May.

The new series of Top Gear is weeks away, and the first teaser for the show has dropped.

Top Gear / BBC / Via youtube.com

In the minute-long trailer you can see a grumpy Matt LeBlanc in a patriotically-adorned Robin Reliant, and what happens to Chris Evans when he goes driving with Sabine Schmitz having eaten too many strawberries.

Fans will be reassured that cars feature very heavily, including the McLaren 675 LT, and Ferrari's F12 Tdf.

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Top Gear returns to the BBC in May.

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Two types of people will take this quiz: those who American, and those who American’t.

Think Stock

Find out if your addiction is scaled or RX.

Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed

Thumbnail via Thinkstock.

The internet wasn’t invented in a day, people!

The first time anyone sent a tweet.

On March 21, 2006, co-founder of Twitter Jack Dorsey hammered out 24 characters of his 140-character limit to craft the world's first tweet. Ten years later, Twitter has established itself as a major form of communication among its over 300 million users!

Twitter: @jack

The first video to be uploaded to YouTube.

"Me at the zoo" was uploaded to YouTube on April 23, 2005, by the site's co-founder Jawed Karim. Today, YouTube has over 1 billion users and has fundamentally altered the way we consume media.

youtube.com

The first photo to be uploaded to the World Wide Web.

In 1992, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee was working on a small project that he called "the World Wide Web." When a rock group known as Les Horribles Cernettes was approached by Berners-Lee to contribute to his project, they had no clue that their photo would become the first picture ever to be uploaded to the World Wide Web.

en.wikipedia.org

The first picture ever posted on Instagram.

At a lone taco stand in Todos Santos, Mexico, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom snapped this picture of his adorable puppy and uploaded it to Instagram in July, 2010. Here's the thing — Instagram wouldn't make its public debut until three months after this picture was made. Which makes this photo the first-ever Instagram in the world!

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We all do ‘em.

Tried to squeeze those hours in:

Via crrabs.tumblr.com

The ol' switcheroo:

Via Twitter: @mikedopee

Had this life-altering moment:

Via Twitter: @jonny_dodds

Had a change panic attack:

Via Twitter: @wayansjr

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No more gym-timidation.

Mel-nik / Getty Images

Fitness can seem intimidating sometimes, but don't worry — the BuzzFeed Health & Beauty newsletter is here to give you all the help you need. Twice a week, we'll send you health and fitness content that fits your life; whether you're a beginner trying to learn easy full-body workouts or a pro looking to increase your gains, the Health & Beauty newsletter has something for you. There's real-world advice from people who have lost the weight, tricks to get you amped up to work out, and so much more. Because no matter who you are, we want to help you feel as confident and powerful as possible!

Sign up now to get fit with the BuzzFeed Health & Beauty newsletter!

Instagram: @beyonce

The booming world of athleisure just got another jolt today with a new line from Beyoncé set to drop in April.

Queen Bey, who has been working with Topshop on an activewear collaboration for at least a year, announced today that the line will be called Ivy Park via an acrobatic photo on Instagram, where she has more than 65 million followers. It will be sold starting April 14 in stores and online at Topshop, Nordstrom, Selfridges, Net-a-Porter, Hudson Bay, and Zalando.

Topshop didn't disclose the prices for the apparel on its website but described it as "mixing high performance technical sportswear with fashion-led casualwear."

"Ivy Park empowers women through sport — no matter what your sporting ability or body shape," the company said on its website. "The collection centres on a core of sports staples: leggings in three rises, crop tops, drop arm tees, sweatshirts and technical jackets." Some of the clothes are featured in this YouTube video published by the brand today.

WeAreIvyPark posted this video on Thursday:

youtube.com

Clearly, the athleisure trend — wearing exercise clothes for hanging out, sweat-breaking optional — shows no sign of letting up. Beyoncé's line joins an array of brands selling activewear, from affordable threads at Old Navy and Target to pricier goods at Kate Spade and Tory Burch.

That's, of course, in addition to the styles offered by more traditional sellers of such clothing, like Lululemon, Nike, and Under Armour. And budding chains like Sweaty Betty and Yogasmoga. And the oft-criticized subscription one, Fabletics, from Kate Hudson. And Rihanna's new collaboration with Puma.

Truly, it's everywhere!

Just last month, Gap CEO Art Peck said activewear could be the retail industry's "most important" trend since the rise of skinny jeans about a decade ago, and surveys show teen girls are increasingly trading denim in for athletic clothing. Analysts at Barclays have estimated the activewear market in the U.S. could grow by almost 50% to more than $100 billion at retail by 2020.

Welcome to the club, Bey.

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LINK: Gap’s Big Bet On Athleta And The New Way American Women Dress

LINK: Teen Girls Are Embracing Yoga Pants And Abandoning Denim

Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed

I almost flunked out of first grade. When the other kids were learning how to write, I just sat there in a daze as my teacher got more and more frustrated. No matter how many times people showed me, I just couldn't hold a pencil right. Whenever I tried to put words on paper, they came out as unreadable squiggles. The teacher had to move on, the other kids learned to recognize me as the class moron, and I was drowning in blank paper.

I was drowning in blank paper.

Then I got lucky: I was pulled out of first grade and put in Special Ed. They told me I was a Special Needs kid. Even though I was aware I was a fuckup and could tell everyone was disappointed in me, I was too young to feel major shame about it. It was all just school to me.

Then an even luckier thing happened to me: I was sent to a teacher who had just started working at the school, and she basically saved me from slipping through the cracks. Ms. Pennington, the Special Ed teacher, was a gentle woman with truly incredible reserves of patience. Her voice had a hint of a Southern accent and she always seemed to be laughing, not with malice but with sympathy, as she coached me on the secret of making a recognizable letter "A.” I remember her hands twisting as she showed me how to arrange my fingers into the incomprehensible sigil that would equip me to hold a pencil.

Much later, my mother told me how proud I was when I finally managed to write a real, "exact A" — so pleased with myself, long after all the other kids were writing crisp sentences. This was part of the magic of Ms. Pennington: She somehow made me feel excited about mastering the arcane secrets of lettercraft, rather than ashamed that I was so far behind.

My difficulty with writing was both physical and perceptual. I had zero coordination: I constantly stumbled over my own feet as if I'd forgotten where I had left them. When Ms. Pennington took me to the local children's hospital to be tested, I was diagnosed with Sensory Integration Disorder, meaning that I couldn't quite turn sight, sound, or touch into awareness. She spent hours teaching me how to throw a frisbee: how to stand, how to hold my arms. On the weekends, my parents took me to special phys-ed classes, where I learned to swim alongside other developmentally disabled kids.

Ms. Pennington was the constant voice in my ear as I wrestled with the pencil, even with other kids in the room who were also struggling with their own problems. She found a way to turn my tendency to daydream into a tool for getting me to learn, and in the process, made me into a lifelong storytelling addict.

She’d give me gold stars and praise every time I got a letter right, but one day she offered me an even better, bigger bribe: If I mastered all my writing skills and got up to speed on my classwork, I could write a play, which would be performed at school.

The reward was irresistible, given the kind of kid I was — a mumbling oddity, slouching around the schoolyard making up weird stories in my head and living in a dream world that was as real as the red brick schoolhouse, the games of dodgeball and keepaway that went over my head. I had imaginary friends, and imaginary adventures, and a whole imaginary life.

I had imaginary friends, and imaginary adventures, and a whole imaginary life.

Ms. Pennington’s bribe worked perfectly. Toward the end of first grade, I wrote a play called The Bad Cad. The Bad Cad was a flamboyant troublemaker, who lived to mess with an unnamed authority figure. That authority figure, who may or may not have been the school principal, endlessly tried to assert control but was foiled by the Bad Cad every time, who dumped buckets on his head and left things for him to trip over. Ms. Pennington told me later that you could even see my penmanship get smoother and more legible the longer I worked on it. It was my first work of creative writing.

It was the first time I can remember feeling like there was a point to school.

The whole idea of a "special needs" child brings an instant stigma to mind, because every child is supposed to have the same needs. We spend a lot of energy, as a society, coming up with systems to make sure every child makes uniform progress. Ms. Pennington did the opposite: She was somehow able to spend so much time with me and come up with a whole individual program, while simultaneously doing the same thing for a bunch of other kids. It still blows my mind.

Recently, my mom told me that she remembered hearing one of the moms at my school boast to some others that her child was in Ms. Pennington's Special Ed class. Word had gotten out that there was this one teacher giving extra one-on-one attention to the learning-disabled kids. Artisanal. It even became a status symbol among the trendy parents.

Once I could actually write, I spent my time scribbling terrible Doctor Who fan fiction in all of my workbooks. I never got particularly good at schoolwork, not until sometime in middle school. But if it hadn’t been for Ms. Pennington’s help, I might have slipped through the cracks completely.

Not for a second did I ever believe, as a child, that my disability made me any less the hero in my own story.

Not for a second did I ever believe, as a child, that my disability made me any less the hero in my own story. I give Ms. Pennington all the credit for that. To this day, when I make up stories about kids who misunderstand and are misunderstood in turn, I don't ever assume that'll make them passive, or a victim, or weak. The figure of the misfit child has been a constant presence in my fiction, going back more than a decade. Kids who are lost in a thorny maze, who can't make any sense of a world that everybody else seems to understand perfectly. Kids who find themselves at odds with others, despite having all the goodwill in the world. But I don't write about them because I am trying to make some kind of a Statement about how their difference is actually a superpower or a source of unique insight. Instead, I think, I'm trying to figure out what becomes of them. Especially the ones who don't get rescued, the way I did.

In the end, Ms. Pennington didn't just teach me how to hold a pencil. She made me a writer.

***

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky (Tor Books, 2016). She's the editor of io9, a blog about science fiction and fantasy, and organizes the Writers With Drinks reading series. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in Tor.com, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, and dozens of anthologies. Her story "Six Months, Three Days" won a Hugo Award.

To learn more about All the Birds in the Sky, click here.

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