Forget about your something old, something new, and something blue. You need your Starbucks instead.
Whoa.
Zach Break Photography / theeverylastdetail.com
It's your big day, so you should probably be awake for it.
Kay English Photography / kayenglishphotography.com
Remember: we were all awkward kids once. Courtesy of your new favourite subreddit, /r/childrenfallingover .
When in doubt, blow stuff up.
Via jalopnik.com
Via giphy.com
Clearly coming back for those dragon balls.
Via giphy.com
Via gizmodo.com
A heartening comic by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal .
You can buy this strip as a poster here, and follow Zach Weinersmith's comics at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
Why isn’t quoting Harry Styles an applicable life skill? We would all be mega-employable if Facebook stalking was a job.
Your friends might be jealous that you matched with a professional athlete but adding it to your CV might be a little overboard.
Via ferrisbuellerexperience.tumblr.com
Two years is an impressive length of time to keep a phone. Now try keeping a job that long.
Via sodahead.com
Not many employers care that you were able to convince people that Emma Watson was going to transfer to your school, even if it traveled far.
Okay, this may come in handy once you land a job but it's not something you want to mention while trying to find one.
You weren’t planning to sleep ever again, were you?
Becky Sloan & Joseph Pelling / Via imgur.com
Becky Sloan & Joseph Pelling / Via imgur.com
Plus the terrifying new fitness app on Google Glass, 10 things that suggest Her could become a reality, and 5 awesome celebs who should totally guest star on The Simpsons .
Twenty years of hilarity: Check out this amazing history of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's best friendship. - [Vulture]
Having trouble getting motivated for that jog? This horrific Google Glass fitness game will make you run for your life. - [Fast Company]
It seems like everyone and their uncle's been a guest on The Simpsons, but these 5 celebrities deserve an invite to Springfield ASAP. - [HelloGiggles]
2014 has been a nightmare for some. For example, this Alaska town partied so hard on New Year's Eve that they destroyed the internet. - [Newser]
“I listen to erotic audiobooks all day on the tractor.”
Happy 10th anniversary. hahaha, jk, long term prank!!!
Via whisper.sh
Of course, why wouldn't you?
The Gummi Bears’ young human friend Cavin was voiced by five different actors. So where are they now?
Then: As a child actor, Jacobs starred as Joey on the All in the Family spin-off Gloria and was the boy in the record store in Pretty in Pink. (You might also remember him as Gremic from the Christian Slater skateboarding flick Gleaming the Cube.) Jacobs voiced Cavin during the first season of Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears.
Now: Today you know him best as the cocreator of Yo Gabba Gabba! and MC Bat Commander on The Aquabats! Super Show! Jacobs has been performing with his superhero-themed band The Aquabats since 1994.
Disney/Phoenix New Times/Nickelodeon / Via blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com
Then: In addition to portraying Cavin in season two of Gummi Bears, Johnson sighed "Good Grief!" as the voice of Charlie Brown on The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show and the classic Peanuts specials Snoopy's Getting Married, Charlie Brown and It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown. The latter features Snoopy and Franklin breakdancing at a nightclub. (We're not kidding.) It also breaks a basic Peanuts rule by showing grown-ups.
Now: Johnson seemingly left the biz in 1989 following a stint on the sitcom Small Wonder. His last voiceover credit is on a show called Argo's Cartoon Connection. If you have any info on what he's doing now, let us know!
Then: Besides voicing Cavin for one season, Faustino was an in-demand child actor on shows like Family Ties and St. Elsewhere. But you probably know him best as Bud Bundy from Married...with Children.
Now: In recent years. Faustino has spoofed his child star days on Entourage and in his Web series Star-ving. He's returned to voice acting of late, lending a little Bud Bundy magic to the parts of Mako on The Legend of Korra and Dagur on Dragons: Riders of Berk.
upload.wikimedia.org / Via Wikimedia
Then: Marsden voiced Cavin during the fourth through sixth seasons of Gummi Bears. A profilic young actor, Marsden had roles in everything from The Munsters Today to Boy Meets World. He was also the voice of Max Goof in Disney's Goofy movies.
Now: Marsden continues to be one of the most sought after voice actors in the animation business. He currently plays Aye-Aye on The Legend of Korra and has lent his pipes to Mad and Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters.
These disturbing images created by DeviantART user Tohad — for his “BADASS” series — might just destroy your childhood.
I guess he lost the taste for honey?
Tohad / Via tohad.deviantart.com
I really thought Grimace would be the first to crack.
Tohad / Via tohad.deviantart.com
I'd like to believe Babar grew up to be a hard partying Sex Pistols fan.
Tohad / Via badassfanarts.tumblr.com
Sent from the future to kill John Connor.
Tohad / Via tohad.deviantart.com
Photograph by Torie Bosch for BuzzFeed
It is more than a decade after their fame peaked, and yet here the Backstreet Boys are — indeed, on a boat — with a few thousand fans, fans who are screaming, shouting, singing along, laughing at every joke, shoving one another to get closer to the stage and to try to grab a hand or get a better photo. Fans who are chanting "What what in the butt?" and "Junk in the trunk" between songs. Fans who are positively shrieking when the boys dance low to "Low."
In a world like this, it is perfectly acceptable for these men, who are just around the bend from middle age, to shamelessly, uncomplainingly wear matching sailor suits — natty white outfits, complete with epaulets and caps boasting scrambled eggs — and for women — at least one-fifth of whom must be 45 or older — to make Beliebers look well-mannered, $17.50 commemorative plastic cups of frozen rum drinks in hand.
Here, they are still boys, and we are still girls.
Soon Nick Carter — the heartthrob, now 33 — jumps down from the stage and, escorted by a beefy guy, wades through the crowd taking pictures and being groped. Behind him, A.J. McLean — the bad boy, 36 — pleads with the fans to be excellent to each other. “What’s Fonzi? Cool. Be cool.”
I’m on a deck above the scrum, trying to snap a photo, when someone behind me says, “Excuse me.” It is a bodyguard, and with him is Brian Littrell — the cute one, 38. He is right there.
My pulse beats in my ears. I say nothing, just grin as he takes a photo with the elderly fan to my left, then a woman in a wheelchair to my right. Adrenaline pricks my knees, my palms. This is closer than I have ever been to one of the Boys, and I am 14. It feels uncomfortable and thrilling, and I wish that my childhood best friend Alison, a devoted Brian girl, were here to squeal with me once he’s gone.
After the Boys depart, the crowd takes on a contemplative, post-orgasmic hush. Friends cluster together to look at one another’s pics and relive the moments. A tearful girl clutching a Chilean flag is quickly engulfed by her friends, who rub her back.
Oh my god. I’m back again.
It has been more than a dozen years since I last heard these screams. Then, in Philadelphia in the late '90s, they were primal, yearning mating calls, even though probably only half of our heaving and reaching bodies had reached puberty. There was no self-consciousness, no posturing to appear cool or above it all. There was only high-pitched ecstasy and longing. (A fair-minded Philadelphia Inquirer critic ruled that a 1999 show “wasn’t awful, just awfully dull for anyone not motivated by hormonal urges.”)
At each of the shows, I screamed with the thousands, dizzied by the fact that I was breathing the same air as the Boys whose eyes watched me from every inch of my bedroom walls. The Boys who inspired me to write fan fiction, which led to a massive website that has its own fans and eventually reached more than a half-million hits, according to my Geocities counter. The Boys whom I retreated to in the depths of adolescent despair, taking refuge in a long-running and convoluted fantasy that involved me dating Nick Carter and being something of a little sister to the rest of the crew. The Boys whom I was ashamed to tell my peers at a Dave Matthews Band-obsessed suburban high school that I loved.
Since my passion withered, I have felt more shame than fondness when I recall how I lost my frizzy little mind over a manufactured boy band whose songs included the nasal and unsexy “If You Want It to Be Good Girl (Get Yourself a Bad Boy).” The embarrassment sharpens when I realize that I still know all the words to “Good Girl” and, worse, find myself dancing if I hear it — and of course I hear it because I pull it up on YouTube. My regret is more complicated than just embarrassment, though: I also feel some perverse guilt. I was one of the legions of fans who abandoned the group by moving on to real-life boys and new music just their own star was tumbling, thanks to changing music tastes, financial mismanagement, and that old standby, personal demons.
So in late October, I tried to come to terms with my 14-year-old self by buying a ticket to the Backstreet Boys’ 20th anniversary cruise to a Carnival-owned island in the Bahamas and back. It would be three nights with more than 2,000 BSB fans who shelled out from $699 to a few thousand dollars to commune with one another and stalk the boys — women (and a few men!) who had no shame in their BSB game.
When I arrived at the airport in Miami, I went to the Carnival counter, as my boarding pass instructed. I asked if I can be checked in. The employee paused.
“Are you sailing today or tomorrow?”
I told him today, and he said, “Since you’re on a special cruise, you’ll have to check in there" and pointed.
He didn’t want to say "Backstreet Boys cruise." Nor did I.
Photograph by Torie Bosch for BuzzFeed
My favorite is a “Backstreet Market”-themed door with merchandise — including a magazine from 2000, handed out with the Black & Blue album, that contains a blurb about my fan fiction website, may it rest in bits.
Photograph by Torie Bosch for BuzzFeed
How much has she spent on the Backstreet Boys? I ask her. Without flinching — and with pride — she estimates $10,000–$15,000 in the last “few” years alone. The money’s gone to more than concerts and the cruise and the expected accouterments; recently, she paid $250 for a 15-minute Skype chat with Nick, as part of his attempt to crowdfund a horror movie about hunters being stalked by an “evil family.” (Total raised: $155,864.)
Jessica’s even brought the Boys into her classroom: She’s used their lyrics to teach English lessons, and photos of the Boys decorate her desk. “The girls are like, ‘Wow, miss. They’re like One Direction, but better,’” she says with glee.
Normally, being in line like this for such a long time, without my iPhone, would feel hopelessly awkward — I’m a terrible conversationalist even with old friends. Which is one of the reasons the Backstreet Boys became so core to my life: It gave me something to talk about with people (online, at least, where I spent most of my time). Every person here delights in sharing her BSB story. They compare notes about recent concerts, about their most pivotal experience — and about the judgment they face from others. Everyone — whether in their twenties or fifties — has been asked condescendingly, “Aren’t you a little old for this?” Sometimes they scoff with pride: Heather, a British woman in her late fifties who now lives in Canada, pooh-poohed, “People expect me to be sitting with my hair in curlers and knitting at my age. Ain’t gonna happen.” Sometimes, it’s said softly and wistfully, like when a woman discusses how scornful her grown kids were when she told them she was going on the cruise.
The island is an artificial paradise apropos of a manufactured boy band. It’s overcast and the clouds hiccup a few raindrops, but fans nevertheless swim in the warm water and eat lousy barbecue served up cafeteria-style, flies buzzing everywhere. The Latin American girls strut around in tiny bikinis, and people take turns snapping group shots for one another. But this is not downtime: Everyone is jockeying to get a good view of the stage in front of a fake pirate ship. The smart girls claim the water not far from the stage, so that they can get in decent beach time while watching the guys. Alas, they are shoved aside when a boat arrives carrying the men of the hour. (No lie: The sky cleared soon before their entrance.)
As the boys make their way to the stage, fans crash forward and yell their names and wave pictures they want signed. As I’m trying to get a peek at Kevin, someone says “Excuse me” behind me. Again, it’s a bodyguard; again, he’s escorting Brian — this time with his wife. He has now snuck up behind me twice. Pardon my cliché, but both times, I’m struck by how very short he is offstage.
The day’s main event begins: Fans are going to play games onstage with the boys. Limbo, musical chairs, an obstacle course that few can actually see. Those who are called onstage make are rapturous, and they often linger after, taking pictures and squealing at each other, until they are firmly asked, again, to leave.
The participants’ joy gives me more of a glow than my weak daiquiri does. But then my buzz is killed. It happens during a game of coconuts, in which each Boy was paired up with a fan. They are to place a coconut between their two bodies, and without using their hands must wiggle the coconut up to between their necks. Nick’s partner is a beautiful, slender girl. Howie Dorough — the shy one, 40 — is partnered with one who looks more like me, and is more representative of the crowd: heavyset. Howie, whose BSB nickname was “Sweet D” in my day, steals Nick’s partner, to the audience’s laughter. When Howie wins, Nick pouts loudly, complaining into the microphone, “He stole my partner! He stole my partner!” If that were me — if I were the one onstage who neither guy wanted — I would react like a 14-year-old: breathless with hurt. But she hops back to her friends, glowing with the aftermath of her encounter. Whether she doesn’t speak English well or simply refuses to let the pettiness bring her down, I don’t know.
It reminds me of something that Beth, the married woman from Chicago, told me earlier. She was a fan for almost a decade before she met them, but she was OK with that. As a teenager, she weighed more than 200 pounds, and she’s heard that a couple of the guys weren’t always equally kind to everyone. That was borne out by a 1999 Spin article, in which Nick and Brian talked about how their security would play “little jokes” on them by bringing up unattractive fans to be serenaded during concerts. As a 15-year-old, I struggled to reconcile that anecdote with my idealized Boys, the ones who sang “I don’t care who you are … as long as you love me.” Those lyrics launched a thousand fan fiction stories in which the Boys fell in love with girls who were overweight.
I wander away and toward the warm Caribbean water to read. The boys depart one by one — some on a boat, some on Jet Skis — and when it’s Nick’s turn to go, he waves and looks right at me. We are talking eye contact. I am wearing clip-on sunglasses on my eyeglasses, and I have a beat-up Penn State baseball hat on, and I have my Kindle in my hand. It feels right that my first brief connection with Nick should happen when I look so utterly dorky.
Photograph by Torie Bosch for BuzzFeed
It was a big year for Jim Carrey.
Fun fact: The movie was Jim Carrey's breakthrough film.
Fun fact: The movie was one of the biggest surprise hits of that year.
Via impawards.com
Fun fact: The film was the second highest grossing film of 1994 and it also garnered Tom Hanks his second (and consecutive) Oscar win for Best Actor.
Fun fact: The movie was Cameron Diaz's feature film debut.
The service offers insurance and protection from hackers.
AAA-pictures/AAA-pictures
Via elliptic.co
Stephen Lam / Reuters / Reuters
Via elliptic.co
Just because it’s made of sugar doesn’t mean it has to be sweet.
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
ontd-political.livejournal.com
Miley and Kanye got all the press, but less famous acts like Imagine Dragons, Luke Bryan, and um…the cast of Duck Dynasty … sold better.
Carlo Allegri / Reuters
Charles Platiau / Reuters
Whatever the problem, she’s got your back.
Her Solution: Fixing your raccoon eyes. Dip a cotton ball in coconut oil and use it to wipe away mascara streaks and smudged eyeliner.
Via weheartit.com
Her Solution: Removing the evidence from your knees, elbows, and so on. After a cut has healed over, rub coconut oil on the scar to gradually lighten it over time. This also works for stretch marks.
Her Solution: Nourishing your cuticles. Coconut oil promotes nail growth and provides the perfect canvas for nail art.
Fox Searchlight Pictures / Via poopinginschool.tumblr.com
Her Solution: Boosting your immune system and aiding weight loss. Vlogger Jenna Marbles swears by blending a spoonful of coconut oil into her breakfast smoothies.
This is what happens when your teacher is the coolest person in your school.
Happy Zayn’s 21st birthday to all of us.
Keith Tsuji / Getty Images
Chang-rae Lee’s sci-fi America isn’t exactly the Taipei I grew up in, but it does feel like home.
Kevin Tang/BuzzFeed
In late-'80s Taipei, where I grew up, Saturday was a work day. Few people tormented themselves with questions of which jobs were fulfilling, what constituted "authenticity," or which bands were cool among tattered Seattle teens. Children spent longer hours at school than bankers did at Wall Street — waking at dawn and studying until after dinner. Most of my neighbors lived in cramped rentals with three generations of their relatives, and most of us were in the business of quietly manufacturing gadgets to the exact whims of America, Japan, and other wealthier countries.
We weren't miserable, either. This was an improvement over the impoverished '60s.
Things look different now. Taipei's posher streets are clogged with startups, design studios, and music venues, and newspapers constantly harp on the rift between young and old. The new generation insists on luxuries like expression, self-fulfillment, the frivolities of coolness, while the older generations grew up in an Asia that told them to keep their head down, avoid politics, and make electronics for San Jose and Tokyo — we were otherwise worthless to the sort of people who read The Economist and listened to BBC World, and if we were worthless to them, our children did not get to eat.
"The soul," as William T. Vollman said, "is not a birthright." Dignity is not doled out to everyone like confetti.
There are many other reasons why I devoured Chang-rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea more quickly than any other book in recent memory. The story is narrated by a voice I know from '80s Taiwanese evening programs. And if you're a child of immigrants, or a native to one of America's less celebrated cities, maybe you'll hear, with a pang, the warm call of something often depicted but not embodied in American literature.
***
Since debuting with Native Speaker, Chang-rae Lee has won plaudits and Pulitzers for elegizing immigrant alienation. His Asian-American characters and war refugees may sometimes win at the bloodsport of capitalism, but few of them will ever feel wanted or welcomed, even by one another.
It makes sense that Lee would borrow the frameworks of a sci-fi thriller. Maybe since Edward Bellamy penned Looking Backward in 1888, American sci-fi has been acute with class allegories. At first glance, the novel has the structural backbone of Elysium and The Hunger Games, but tonally it's much closer to Cloud Atlas' Sonmi-451 and George Saunders' Jon.
Chang-rae Lee's future America is divided between Charters, Facilities, and Counties — luxurious gated communities, factory towns, and desolate rural poverty. The cities of Detroit and Baltimore have imported pliant Chinese laborers who meld with the local populations and staff huge factories. Their descendants — the "facilities" people — are taught to be grateful for the chance to labor 100-hour workweeks. At least they're not in the Counties. Beyond the walls of their cities is absolute environmental devastation and lawlessness.
The collective voice of the Facilities narrate the book. Fan, our heroine, hails from B-more, a city now streamlined to produce fish for health-conscious Charter residents. Fan is a diver in one of the fish hatcheries, and we're told it's in work that she "came closest to finding herself, by which we don't mean gaining 'self-knowledge' or understanding one's 'true nature' but rather how at some point you can see most plainly that this is what you do, this is how you fit in the wider ecology."
Via jasonblog.tw
Not a thought of labor exploitation clouds Fan's mind, because she does it out of love for her family, or at least a very abstract idea of it. In the future, there is no OWS-like internet phenomenon to ask her why she doesn't love herself as a Charter does. She was never taught, anyway, to think of her time and effort as something that could be wasted.
But, one day, she does the unthinkable among her family-centric clan: She leaves B-more to search for her abducted boyfriend, setting in motion a detective story, and a story of a slave laborer's emancipation. She roams the open Counties, seeing the leafy horizon for the first time, tasting rancid rain, driving on the ruined highways of the decrepit American civilization. Out there, she relies for the first time on the kindness of strangers, and out there she is betrayed over and over. For a while, she's taken in by a fallen Charter veterinarian called Quigley. Meanwhile, the collective "we" of B-more narrates her adventures in a creepy consensus-building voice borrowed from the PA systems of my Taiwanese elementary school. It speaks in a weird Adam Johnson lyrical PR-speak. It stares at injustices, and sort of half-smiles, and quickly looks away. The narrator is equally a loving parent and a neglectful villain to Fan.
The B-more in the book is not exactly '80s Taiwan or Korea, or a present-day Foxconn factory in China; nor is it not those places either. And the difference between Charters and B-more is as cultural as it is material. Charters define the world's science, art, and ideology. Their pettiest romances play out on the world's biggest movie screens. The Facilities do not get to speak. In Charter TV soap operas, the New Chinese people take these roles:
"We're mostly bystanders or else hardworking service people for Charter heroes and heroines, but sometimes more prominent foils, too, like a recent character in St. Clair Beach named Ji-lan, a beautiful woman from D-Troy, the big Midwestern facility, who captures the heart of a married Charter executive and causes him much delicious and humiliating trouble ... it's no surprise that it's Ji-lan who loses all in the end, everyone learning a harsh lesson in what can happen when you stray too far from your circle."
While the indictment of present-day global relations seem obvious, Lee refuses to cast two-dimensional villains. When Fan finally arrives at a Charter town, she finds that life there is not all well either. An old heiress keeps a harem of New Chinese servants and dresses them up in anime costumes, cooing to them and indulging them because they're her closest thing to a meaningful relationship. A young doctor is too busy slaving away at his job and paying mortgages to marry his girlfriend. Very occasionally, Charters allow some math whizzes from the facilities to immigrate and work for their corporations too. Some Charter people are grotesque, most are devout "lifelong Connoisseurs of Me," expending their free time worrying about their diets, music tastes, and the quality of their sex lives. But they aren't without their lonelinesses and sorrows. And a great many Charters find themselves exiled to the Counties through bad luck, where they fare poorly because they possessed "solely Charter-specific skills, such as real estate speculators, or brokers of insurance stocks, or the writer/creators of evening programs."
Just when we are certain we know who to hate, or who to blame, Lee will show us a facet of a character that makes that impulse seem pat. There's a point when we come to learn why Quigley used to be a veterinarian, and why so many Charters kept pets instead of raising children. Secure jobs in Charters are few and competitive, so Charter children have to undermine each other from the moment of birth:
"There's a kind of malaise that B-Mors and Counties people never really suffered, that empty-lunged feeling that can come from being measured, unceasingly, from the moment of birth. Pets were simpler to raise, in every way, plus they couldn't disappoint the family or themselves and naturally offered and received affection unconditionally, which in this world is rare."
In B-more, you may lack privacy and personal liberty, and harsh economics may make daily life deeply tiring and unimaginative, but your huge New Chinese clan loves you no matter how much they hate your hair, or how stupid they think your aspirations are. As the narrator concludes: "do not discount the warmth of the hive."
Perhaps American sci-fi is made to tell immigrant stories. And maybe there's a reason why, during a 24-hour travel back to Taipei, I felt welcomed home by the collective voice of B-more.
I was born fortunate, but many elders in hometown grew up like B-more residents, unable to imagine a retirement, or what they'd do with their time other than crushing labor. They shy away from cameras, desire no luxury of uniqueness for themselves, meanwhile toiling until midnight, hoping their children will someday become Charters. They willingly strip-mine their every last moral resource to feed their clan. And in an imperfect world, maybe that's how love express itself, one bitterly-earned bowl of rice at a time.
