As any true horror fan should know, in the movies, senses like sight, speech, and hearing sometimes work against characters.

In the 2016 film Hush, the protagonist, Maddie, can’t hear. The 2018 film A Quiet Place follows a family who must remain silent, as sound attracts deadly monsters. And in Netflix’s recently released hit Bird Box, the characters must wear blindfolds to avoid seeing threatening creatures with the potential to invade their minds.

All three are terrifying, slightly similar scenarios, so naturally the lovely people of the internet decided to lump them into one glorious meme.

The “Can’t hear, can’t speak, can’t see” meme, as it’s being referred to, combines the plots from the three horror films mentioned above and breaks the tension by adding another, ideally lighthearted “can’t.” (It’s also not to be confused with those other Bird Box memes that people accused Netflix of spreading.)

Examples include references to MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This,” Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Queer Eye, and more. Here are some of the most enjoyable.

Everyone on Twitter knows you can’t pass up the opportunity to make a meme once you see, hear, or talk about it, so log on and do your thing, people.

Lady Gaga has officially made her Las Vegas debut with brilliant blue hair and an emotional AF performance of “Shallow.”

The singer closed out the opening night of her Enigma residency by performing the hit song from A Star Is Born live, for the first time, and boy was it something.

“For a really long time I felt so misunderstood about the way I dressed, the way I talked, my attitude,” Gaga explained before sitting down at the piano to play. “They thought it was shallow. But this shit is deep as fuck.”

“I love you so much. You’re a star,” she said to the crowd. “But the truth is, you gave birth to me.”

In a nearly eight-minute-long video shared on YouTube, Gaga closes the show with a gorgeous performance of “Shallow,” complete with a crying break, and a fabulous farewell from herself and the crew. BRB booking a trip to Vegas.

Image: yogysic / getty

By Sarah Kessler2018-12-30 08:51:00 -0800

In the days of cold, hard newsprint, only people who could draw were successful comic strip authors. In some cases, this resulted in comic strips that had very nice pictures, but weren’t all that funny (cough, Blondie). Thankfully, the internet has taught us not to accept an inferior form of comic artistry, but a more flexible one.

Comic strip enthusiasts who want funny but don’t care about pretty drawing can have their strips, those who want artistry have theirs, and even those with very specific tastes can find something just right.

The best part about these developments is that they allow you, regardless of any talent as an artist or comedian, to create your very own comic strip. Depending on what you’re going for, you can use one of these four sites to help you do it.

Image: screenshot / make Beliefs Comix

MakeBeliefsComix.com is a comic strip creator easy enough for children to use, but there are enough options for adults to get a message across, too. Users can choose from 25 characters to fill a two, three, or four-paneled comic strip. 

The pre-set options that make the site so easy to use can also be slightly limiting. Your custom comic strips will look pretty generic. There are only about four different expressions for each character. The upside of this is that you can finish a perfectly respectable online comic in about 10 minutes.

The creator, Bill Zimmerman, is the author of numerous books — including Make Beliefs: A Gift For Your Imagination. “My hope is that by giving you a choice of characters with different moods and the chance to write words and thoughts for them,” he writes on the site, “you will tap into your creativity and explore new possibilities.”

Image: screenshot / pixton

This is the comic strip creation website for artists. 

The site allows for as much customization as possible without the need to build from scratch. Instead of just choosing the color of a character’s shirt, for instance, there are options to adjust the collar, shape, sleeves, and size of the shirt. Instead of relying on preset poses and emotions for each character, users are able to click and drag character limbs into new postures and can customize eyes, ears, noses and hairstyles. 

It’s also convenient to add images from Flickr or Google images.

Successful comics vie every day for a spot in the prestigious Pixton top 10.

Image: screenshot / toondoo

ToonDoo hits the fine balance between creative versatility and user friendliness, ensuring that the final results look sharp. While there’s still an extensive library of characters and objects to use in your comic strip, there are also tools to create your own touches. The TraitR tool allows you to create custom characters and DoodleR lets you paint freely. If you want to use your own photos or another image in your comic strip, you can manipulate it through the ImagineR photo tool.

Unlike other comic strip creation sites, there’s an option to save your project mid-creation so that you can come back to it later. When you finish a handful of ToonDoos, you can compile a book. It’s easy to embed individual cartoons in a website or share them over networks, and you can buy print-quality images of your favorites.

Image: Screenshot / strip generator

The stoic characters of Strip Generators lend themselves to sarcastic commentary. There’s not a whole lot of opportunity to create a personal style — you need to work with what the site gives you — but that doesn’t mean you can’t be creative. The community-themed galleries are testimony to this.

One unique capability is adjustable frames. If you need a specific cell to be a bit wider or longer, you can just drag the wall. Another stand-out trait is the personal library. When you tweak an image to get it just right, you can save it to use again later.

Additional reporting by Jack Morse. Original story published in 2010 and updated in 2018.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson slayed the gift-giving game this year.

For Christmas, he went big and bought his mom a brand new home. Then he captured her reaction on video and shared the touching footage with his 126 million Instagram followers.

“This one felt good… Bought my mom a new home for Christmas,” The Rock captioned the video of his mom unwrapping the card, which he disguised as a “Willy Wonka Golden Ticket.”

“All our lives growing up we lived in little apartments all across the country,” he wrote, explaining that he first bought his parents a home in 1999, but five years later they got divorced. 

“Since then I always made sure my mom and dad have everything they’ll ever need — houses, cars etc. But the house this time is a special one and the timing is very meaningful,” he wrote. “I told her to treat this card like it’s ‘Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket’ because she gets to choose any home she wants — anywhere she wants.”

As The Rock’s mom learned her son was planning to buy her a new house she began to sob and the two shared an emotional embrace.

The Rock ended his post by writing, “I always say, if you got a good mama, then you gotta pretty good shot at becoming a decent human being. And somehow, somewhere along the line I became one lucky SOB to be able to make stuff like this happen.”

Awwwww!

In case you had any doubts, we’re here to remind you that animals are too pure for this world.

The latest proof can be found in a video shared by Twitter user @jor_nicole4, in which a dog is seen PETTING a cat, and that same cat is then seen HUGGING the dog.

It’s a moment so remarkably precious you just need to see it for yourself to believe it.

For those who are curious, the friendly cat’s name is Pumpkin and the friendly dog’s name is Maggi.

They are both very good pets and it appears they do cute playful cuddle shit like this on the regular — though this next video definitely looks less fun than the first.

Is this the energy we want going into 2019 or what? (It most definitely is.)

Image: SAEED ADYANI / NETFLIX

Since the Sandra Bullock horror film Bird Box was released on Netflix on Dec. 21, it’s become the talk of Twitter.

According to Netflix, 45 million accounts watched the film in its first week, and while it’s likely no one truly understands the meaning of it, viewers are still searching for answers.

One of the movie’s main unsolved mysteries was what the heck the monsters, or dark creatures responsible for the worldwide mass suicide, looked like. And while we can’t show you, in an interview with Bloody Disgusting, the cast describes the creatures perfectly.

According to screenwriter Eric Heisserer, the monsters were almost shown on screen, but the decision was ultimately made to exclude them.

“There was a time when one of the producers was like, ‘No, you have to see something at some point’ and forced me to write essentially a nightmare sequence where Malorie experiences one in that house,” Heisserer said.

And Bullock, who played Malorie, explained what exactly made them so terrifying.

“It was a green man with a horrific baby face,” she said. “It was snake-like, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to see it when it first happens. Just bring it into the room. We’ll shoot the scene.’ I turn and he’s like this [growling at me.] It’s making me laugh. It was just a long fat baby.”

“It was a green man with a horrific baby face.” 

“It so easily becomes funny. We actually shot that and spent a lot of energy on, but every time I saw it, I was like this is not going to be tense. It’s just going to be funny,” director Susanne Bier added.

“At first, Sandy was like, ‘I don’t want to see it’ because she thought it was scary. Then it was like, ‘Don’t show it to me because [I’ll laugh].’ Every time I did it, I was like, ‘Shit, that’s a different film,’” she went on.

In fact, Bier said the “monster” was so ridiculously comical that they’re “going to deliver it to Saturday Night Live.”

And though John Krasinski chose to show the monsters in his horror film, A Quiet Place, which is being compared to Bird Box as a result of some similar plot lines, Bier thinks the Bird Box team made the right call in keeping the creatures off screen. 

“Whatever those beings are, they tap into your deepest fear. Everybody’s deepest fear is going to be different from the other person. I think to suddenly take upon a concrete shape in order to illustrate that becomes weak. Where the conceit is really strong, then trying to illustrate it is kind of almost meaningless. So it would have been the wrong decision,” she said.

Spoilers follow for Love, Simon; Anna and the Apocalypse; and Ralph Breaks the Internet.

“You really piss me off, you know? Because you know they shit all over everybody, including you. I can’t believe you’d be this stupid. He’s going to use your ass and throw you away! God, I would have died for you. You can’t do this and respect yourself. You just can’t.”

In the character of Duckie from Pretty in Pink, screenwriter John Hughes gave us the siren call of the Nice Guy. The Nice Guy is Xander from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He’s Snape from Harry Potter. 

Typically a bit of a social outcast, he seems sweet enough—he many even be your best friend—until it twigs that you’re romantically interested in someone who’s not him. Then the facade crumbles, revealing an insecure, entitled jerk who simply can’t fathom that the woman he’s into may have feelings towards him that stop at the platonic. 

He’s been so nice, after all.

The toxic masculinity inherent in the “Nice Guy” has begun to be challenged. 

What’s particularly telling, and particularly troubling, about media examples of Nice Guys from years past is that their creators don’t seem to recognize the character type as the troubling, misogynist trope that it is. 

The original ending of Pretty in Pink had Andie (Molly Ringwald) end up with Duckie (John Cryer) instead of rich-boy Blane (Andrew McCarthy). Director Howard Deutch only changed the ending after girls literally booed the pair ending up together at a test screening. (The ideal Pretty in Pink ending has Andie ditching both men in favor of hanging out with Annie Potts, but that’s neither here nor there.) Snape’s unrequited love of Harry’s mother Lily is seen within the Harry Potter series as tragic and romantic, rather than obsessive. And sweet ’n’ lovable Xander can slut-shame Buffy as much as he wants without anyone ever calling him out on it. 

But the times, they are a’changing. In 2018, the Nice Guy? He wasn’t so nice.

In movies like Love, Simon; Anna and the Apocalypse; and even Ralph Breaks the Internet, the toxic masculinity inherent in the “Nice Guy” concept has begun to be challenged. 

In Love, Simon, there’s a subplot involving a teenager named Martin (Logan Miller) who’s obsessed with magic and new girl Abby (Alexandra Shipp) in equal measure. He’s a Duckie for the 21st century, someone whose borderline-stalking attitude towards the object of his attention is counterbalanced by a social outcast status and quirky demeanor that renders him, if not entirely likable, at least more pathetic than actively intimidating.

Or at least it would, if Love, Simon didn’t fully acknowledge the toxicity of Martin’s behavior. When he discovers Simon’s (Nick Robinson) homosexuality and uses that knowledge to blackmail him into getting close to Abby, the film recognizes it for the horrible act that it is. A grand gesture at a football game leads to him being gently rejected by Abby, which in turn causes Martin to out Simon to the whole school as a means of distracting his classmates away from his own humiliation. 

What can a socially awkward nerd really do? The answer, we now realize, is “a lot.”

Martin is not a wholly unsympathetic character by the end of the film. But his clear regret at his past behavior is depicted less as a brushing-aside of what he’s done than an indication that, with a little bit of hard work and self-examination, he can stop being such a massive tool. 

In the end, Martin doesn’t get the girl.

Of course, 2018 wasn’t the first year that people realized Nice Guys are actually entitled nightmares. The villain in the criminally underrated 2010 animated film Megamind is a card-carrying Nice Guy who thinks becoming a superhero will get his crush object to like him and flips straight into supervillain mode when he realizes that’s not the case. 

The starkest case of the Nice Guy-as-Villain can be found in Nacho Vigalondo’s 2016 film Colossal, which is masterful in its gradual unveiling of just how much aw-shucks hometown boy Oscar (Jason Sudekis) resents main character Gloria (Anne Hathaway) for her success and her lack of interest in him.

The defense of the Nice Guy goes something like this: They’re not all assholes! Some of them are just socially awkward dorks! That’s the case in director John McPhail’s zombie Christmas musical Anna and the Apocalypse. 

Lead character Anna (Ella Hunt) is pined after by John (Malcolm Cumming), her best friend who’s clearly been into her for years but is too shy to say anything about it. Then the zombie apocalypse happens. You know where this is going: A brief respite from the chaos. A confession of love. Ella and John facing the undead hordes as a newly minuted couple. 

Nah. Anna’s subversion of the Nice Guy trope is much more low-key than what we get in Love, Simon or Colossal, but at the same time it’s more authentic-feeling, zombies be damned. 

It goes by quickly. Anna makes it clear, without putting it in so many words, that she knows how John feels about her, and that she loves him, too—as a friend. He’s clearly sad, but he doesn’t berate her or attempt to argue her into giving him a shot. The subject is closed. John could have been written as a Nice Guy. Instead, he’s just… a nice guy.

Another coulda-been Nice Guy who turns out to be actually nice is Wreck-It Ralph, who skirts close to the platonic version of this trope in Ralph Breaks the Internet. The romantic element isn’t there, but the other building blocks are. 

Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) wants to move from her quiet arcade game to the more exciting Slaughter Race, located in the scary world of the internet. Her best friend Ralph (John C. Reilly) gets possessive, trying to convince Vanellope that Slaughter Race is awful before eventually going behind her back to infect the game so she won’t want to live there. It’s the Nice Guy, Friendship Version.

Ralph’s jealousy manifests as a King Kong-style monster determined to keep Vanellope with him, her own feelings be damned. Confronted by the worst version of himself, Ralph realizes that his behavior was motivated not by anything Vanellope did, but by his own insecurities. In the end, he accepts that Vanellope has the right to make decisions about her own life, and the pair of them are happier for it.

In Love, Simon and Colossal, the Nice Guy is laid bare as the monster—literally, in Colossal’s case—that he is. In Anna and the Apocalypse, he’s shown as he should be, responding to unrequited affection in a healthy and mature fashion. And in Ralph Breaks the Internet, we see a man actively work through his Nice Guy tendencies, realize the toxic emotional well they spring from, and come out the other side a happier human being (well, collection of pixels) capable of forming much healthier relationships. 

So what happened? It’s easy to point to the increased presence of women at the table. Nice Guys exist in real life, after all, as the supposed feminist allies who whine about being “friendzoned.” It makes sense that women would be more sensitive to the ways in which the fictional Nice Guy veers dangerously close to the real-life creeper. Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda, the book upon which Love, Simon is based, was written by Becky Albertalli. Pamela Ribon co-wrote Ralph Breaks the Internet. 

But both those movies were directed by men. Male writer/directors are behind both Colossal and Anna and the Apocalypse. And it’s not like women are immune from perpetuating the Nice Guy trope. (Hi, J.K. Rowling.) 

Where you can find a more direct cause for this widespread reexamination of the insidious nature of the Nice Guy is in the changing realities of male nerd culture. 

You used to be able to shrug aside the Nice Guy’s more stalker-y tendencies—so the media they appeared in told us—because they were just so damn harmless. What can a socially awkward nerd really do? The answer, we now realize, is “a lot.” Filtered through Reddit and 4chan, a group that used to be perceived as scrappy underdogs gave birth to GamerGate and the alt-right. 

In 1986, Duckie called Andie stupid and told her she was unworthy of respect for daring date to a man who wasn’t him. Thirty years later, he’d have gone straight to r/incels to whine about “sex redistribution,” “chads,” and “soy boys.” 

The Nice Guy was never nice. The movies are just now starting to catch up.

“New year, who dis?”

As we turn our calendars to January 2019, that’s a phrase you should be saying to some not-so-great trends and people who were popular in this medium-key trash year.

Before we say goodbye to 2018, let’s make an effort to start fresh by leaving behind a few negative memories and abandoning things that make life more unpleasant.

Not sure where to start? No worries! Here are 13 things you should consider leaving behind to start the year off on the right foot.

1. Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook, quite frankly, is exhausting and I think the time to cut ties with the harmful social media platform has finally come. Even aside from the whole Russia interfering with the 2016 election mess, the company’s made so many mistakes this year alone.

Image: BOB AL-GREENE/MASHABLE

If you’ve been thinking about deleting your account but are on the fence, here are some recent events to consider. In 2018 there’s been a hack that “directly affected” millions of accounts, a weird bug that dug up past messages, an internal memo released by a former employee that accused Facebook of failing its black employees and users, Zuck’s beef with Apple, company documents that were seized by the UK government, that hearing Zuck straight up didn’t attend, and an embarrassing PDF that revealed Facebook considered selling access to data, to name a few.

Why are we still wasting time on this problematic platform? Write down some important birthdays so you don’t forget, make sure your close friends and coworkers have your phone number so they can invite you directly to any gatherings, and delete it from your life. You’ll feel free.

2. The term “hot take”

Merriam-Webster defines “hot take” as “a quickly produced, strongly worded, and often deliberately provocative or sensational opinion or reaction,” usually in response to some news. If that’s true, then hooooo boy have people strayed from the proper usage of the term.

Image: screengrab/merriam-webster

Hot Take: These days people think everything‘s a hot take. It’s become a synonym for any opinion, which is wrong because not all opinions are sensational and most times sticking the word “hot” in front of “take” doesn’t make your take hot, it just makes you sound like an ass.

In 2019, let’s all try to limit our dubbing of hot takes to like, at most, one per month.

3. Those sign bunny memes

If you’ve spent any portion of 2018 on Twitter, odds are you’ve seen those memes of the lil ASCII bunnies holding ASCII protest signs. I regret to inform you that while the tweets are extremely cute, they’re also kind of old, take too much effort to successfully compose, and are overused. It’s time to let them go and make room for all the new meme trends we’ll undoubtedly feel pressured to take part in.

Image: mashable composite

4. Bad cooking videos

Cooking videos are taking over the internet. On nearly every website you visit, footage of hands assembling ingredients autoplays. 

Whatever happened to our love for actual cooking shows on the Food Network that take you through the lengthy process of assembling a dish rather than simply dumping spices from cute little bowls or snapping to magically crack eggs?

There are an overwhelming amount of Tasty-style videos in the world in 2018. We don’t need a video for every food, people. And we definitely don’t need videos for recipes that have less that three ingredients or use no seasoning. We’re better than that. I hope.

Also, I’d like to shout a huge old “NOPE” to those gross “Meals Cooked in Mouth” videos. Keep those in 2018, please.

5. Gritty hate 

The Philadelphia Flyers introduced their new hairy orange mascot, Gritty, this year. And while many people adore the large, eccentric sports enthusiast, others are growing a bit tired of Gritty’s continual antics and strong social media presence.

If you’re a Gritty hater, leave those negative vibes behind in the new year. Gritty is a nice fun thing and we could all use as many of those as we can get. And if you know someone who’s anti-Gritty and refuses to reconsider, honestly maybe it’s time to stand up for what you love and leave them behind.

6. Unnecessary social media updates

Let’s set some social media parameters for the new year, shall we? How about we kick of 2019 by vowing to post … less. Or rather, make an effort to only post what’s absolutely necessary.

Do you absolutely need to tweet a minute-by-minute update on your delayed flight? Must you live stream every time you unbox something you ordered from Amazon? And do you need to post the same exact content to your Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram every single day? Feels like a hard no. Take a break once in a while. And give your followers a break, too.

7. Drawn out revival rumors

The last few years, the entertainment industry has been all about revivals. We’ve seen a bunch of TV shows — like American Idol, Full House, Gilmore Girls, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Twin Peaks, Will and Grace, and more — make their return to the screen, and though they’re not always successful, there’s no denying some, like Queer Eye, have been an absolute delight.

But months and sometimes even years before a revival is confirmed, fans have to deal with a constant, confusing stream of revival rumors.

I’m a die-hard fan of The Office, for example, but I don’t know how many more “X actor is down for a revival. Will it happen?” headlines my heart can take without bursting. It’s an emotional roller coaster and I’m exhausted.

I know it’s exciting to hear the stars of a show you love would be open to bringing it back, but maybe we don’t have to ask the actors about it in every single interview. Just let us know when the revival is and then we’ll celebrate!

8. Cringey beauty trends

Nails that resemble combs, corkscrews, human teeth, and even HAIR? Eyebrows shaped like coat hangers, fishtails, right angles, and halos? No thank you! 2018 has given us some weird AF beauty trends, so in 2019 maybe we can take a break and tone down the shock value a bit.

9. Your love of plastic straws

From the looks of 2018, the straw-pocolypse, or world free from plastic straws, is coming. This year  plastic straw bans spread across the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Businesses like McDonald’s and Starbucks also made efforts to ban plastic straws in hopes of preserving the environment and cutting down on the world’s harmful and overwhelming amount of single-use plastic waste. And even Disney got in on the action.

Why not get prepared for the anti-plastic straw movement and stock up on reusable water bottles and straws now? This guide will help. And you can find more environment-friendly tips to manage your waste here.

<img class="" data-credit-name='amazon‘ data-credit-provider=”custom type” src=”https://i.amz.mshcdn.com/4pynCyANCPJyQjOBoJmX4KOtaYg=/fit-in/1200×9600/https%3A%2F%2Fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fcard%2Fimage%2F893195%2F663e62e9-16f5-4e1d-ac8d-78586029cfb1.jpg&#8221; alt=”Reusable straws” data-fragment=”m!8005″ data-image=”http://bit.ly/2AmblUd; data-micro=”1″>

10. The Paul brothers

The internet is long, long overdue for a breakup with Logan and Jake Paul. Over the years the two controversial YouTube sensations have shown they’ll do just about anything to get some video views.

After Logan Paul came under fire for the insensitive Aokigahara forest vlog he posted in January, he spent the rest of the year uploading other offensive videos, trolling celebs, and delivering insincere-sounding apologies. Enough is enough, people. It’s time to stop consuming Paul content.

11. High heeled shoes that shouldn’t have heels

In 2019 can we please stop trying to make high heels work in every possible circumstance? Some shoes are not meant to be transformed into heels, and that’s OK. Crocs for example. I mean, look at this!

<img class="" data-credit-name='CROCS/AMAZON‘ data-credit-provider=”custom type” src=”https://i.amz.mshcdn.com/DUrVUHgzh7g8U13bypkqnC-wtr8=/fit-in/1200×9600/https%3A%2F%2Fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fcard%2Fimage%2F892843%2F2c447b1c-d80b-4635-b636-6c7d9d342a15.jpg&#8221; alt=”Crocs  Cyprus V heels” data-fragment=”m!89d6″ data-image=”http://bit.ly/2Ss3v2d; data-micro=”1″>

12. Strict beverage seasons

Summer is also known as rosé and iced coffee season by the beverage police, but both of those drinks are delicious and shouldn’t be limited to a single season. If “frozen hot chocolate” is allowed to be sold in the winter why can’t people enjoy iced coffee? And we don’t cancel hot coffee in the summer so it seems a little hypocritical, no? 

2019 should be the year of breaking down strict beverage barriers and allowing people to drink whatever they want, whenever they want without judgement. (Except for explicitly seasonal drinks like the pumpkin spice or peppermint mocha lattes, which have seasonal-specific flavors).

Image: Getty Images/EyeEm

13. Spending too much time online

Many people (myself included) spend hours a day using Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. Social media has undoubtedly become addicting and while no one likes FOMO, it’s healthy to take a break.

Image: vicky leta / mashable

Sure, you might have to stay up-to-date with online culture for your job, but on the weekend? Try limiting your time online, or at least being more aware of how long you spend using social media apps with some help from you phone settings. And, hey, if you get rid of your Facebook you’re already ahead of the game on this one. Good job.

Here’s to better year!

Each year, Japanese whalers haul hundreds of harpooned whales aboard their giant 8,145-ton vessel, the Nisshin Maru. And for decades, they’ve killed most of these whales in the open Antarctic seas, under the guise of performing scientific “research.”

But now Japan is changing course, in a curious way.

On Wednesday Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga announced that the nation will retreat from killing whales in the Antarctic waters. Instead, the Japanese have dropped the pretense of hunting whales for research and say they will strictly hunt whales in waters around Japan — mostly for the whales’ meat.

“It’s a bit of a strange kind of move,” Carl Safina, a marine ecologist at Stonybrook University, said in an interview, noting that Japan still intends to hunt whales, but just not in certain whale-rich waters.   

While this leaves the Southern Hemisphere free of whaling for the first time in centuries — a true conservation victory — the Japanese continued killing of whales still has dubious legal merit. 

Following Wednesday’s announcement, Japan will soon be leaving the United Nation’s International Whaling Commission — the world body in charge of whale conservation. This commission halted commercial whaling over 30 years ago, in 1986. Since then, nearly every nation in the world has stopped commercial whaling.

But now Japan will be largely on its own — a sort of whaling renegade unbound from the global agreement and still killing whales — though in its own waters.

Image: Sea Shepherd / Marianna Baldo

“Now, they’re blatantly criminal operations,” Paul Watson, a captain and president of the anti-poaching organization Sea Shepherd, said in an interview. Watson has repeatedly led campaigns to intervene during Japanese whaling operations on the open ocean.

“Basically they will be pirates,” added Carolina Castro, a Sea Shepherd media manager, over email.

Yet, by leaving the International Whaling Commission, Japan will no longer be beholden to the commission’s conservation rules, regardless of the reality that most every nation in the world has stopped hunting whales. 

But even if Japan did remain bound to the whaling conservation agreement, there’s no world power that would to stop Japan from whaling in its own waters, specifically Japan’s “Exclusive Economic Zone,” which stretches 200 miles from its coast. 

“The trouble with all the conservation agreements is that there’s no enforcement mechanism for almost any of them,” said Safina.

Iceland and Norway — the other two whaling nations — also kill whales with impunity. No other government intervenes. Rather, nations can impose economic sanctions, if they wanted. For instance, the U.S. Magnuson‐Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act of 2006 states that foreign nations should be punished for engaging in illegal fishing. 

While commercial whaling likely won’t ever be stopped by another government, it now exists as a taboo, a fringe, antiquated practice that eventually might die out on its own.

“There’s not any real need for anything from a whale in modern industrialized civilization,” said Safina. “Our respect for life on the planet should make it seem appalling to kill the grandest living things that have ever existed.”

The good news  

For those seeking to protect whales — whose numbers were vastly diminished in the 20th Century — the Japanese decision is welcome news.

Whaling will continue, but there will be less of it. 

“The silver lining is they don’t feel like killing whales much anymore — they’re only going to kill them in Japan’s territorial waters,” said Safina. “I don’t find this to be very upsetting.”  

“They’ve retreated to their own economic zone,” said Watson. “It’s wonderful news from my point of view.”

Image:  Garry Stokes/Sea Shepherd

Although Japan’s greater motives aren’t known, there’s potential that they intend to wind down their whaling operations, possibly for good. After all, the business, with diminished demand, is not likely turning much of a profit — if any profit.

“It hasn’t made money for decades,” noted Watson.

Rather, Watson argues modern whaling is driven by political influence. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe is from a whaling district, he said, and also noted that both a strong political board and whaling union keep the practice afloat.

“It’s all political — it doesn’t make any economic sense,” said Watson. “There are thousands of tons of refrigerated whale meat that can’t be sold.”

“Maybe they are sick of doing it”

Safina wonders if the recent move is to help the Japanese “save face.” In other words, perhaps the Japanese want to gradually get out of the whaling, but don’t want to appear weak or influenced.

“Maybe they are sick of doing it,” said Safina. “But they can’t just stop because that would make it look like they bowed to pressure, and they are obsessed with saving face — the Japan government is obsessed with it.”

Whatever Japan’s longer-term aims, the retreat of hunting will be of benefit to whales, which will now be free from hunting in the entire Southern Hemisphere. 

And more whales are of considerable value to the ocean’s food web, which benefits from a process called the whale pump: Whales fertilize the surface waters with large plumes of feces, replenishing the surface waters and as consequence, making them more productive. 

“There’s never too many whales,” said Watson.

  

Image: image courtesy of netflix

Even in a year that gave us peak Q Anon, this may be the most 2018 conspiracy theory ever. There are people online who believe Netflix used bot accounts to spread viral memes about its record hit movie Bird Box. 

The over-the-top apocalyptic thriller, which features a family making the perilous journey down a river in hopes of finding a community safe from invisible monsters that have taken over the world, is ripe with meme potential. The monsters inexplicably make victims commit suicide, which plays perfectly into the younger generation’s grimdark sense of humor.

Here’s a representative sample of Bird Box themed memes that have flooded Twitter feeds in recent days:

If you’ve watched Bird Box, you’d probably find these memes hilarious. But one influential Twitter user became convinced they were evidence of a conspiracy. 

In a now-deleted tweet that gained more than 10,000 likes and 3,600 retweets before it was taking down, @samiswine claimed that Netflix is “using dozens of fake accounts with suspiciously low tweet/follower counts to seed Twitter with viral memes about their movie.”

In the viral thread, which is still accessible through archives, @samiswine also implied that Netflix was using “stolen pics” from minors’ profiles to make the accounts seem more real. 

As with many conspiracy theories, the claim soon fell apart. Several accounts responded to @samiswine and denied that they were bots — they’re just teens who like making memes. One even apologized for not having many followers. 

Netflix didn’t have an official response to the conspiracy. But a company representative said that “the meme content happened on its own and spread organically.”

So why all the sudden interest in Bird Box from people who never seem to tweet? Well, as Atlantic reporter Taylor Lorenz first pointed out, screenshots of tweets look really good on Instagram. They’re using you as a staging post, Twitter. They’re just not that into you. 

As those who follow this stuff know, the classic meme format — block letters superimposed on an image — is now seen as out of date. Tweets have become the go-to template for memes. The accounts behind the viral Bird Box tweets very likely weren’t making them for Twitter, but for that sweet, sweet Insta clout.

As This Is Insider notes, teens and college kids are on their holiday breaks. They have time to watch movies and tweet about them, which would explain the influx of Bird Box content. Despite the film’s lukewarm reviews, people just liked watching Sandra Bullock wield a machete. Netflix reported that a record-breaking 45,037,125 accounts watched the movie in its first week.

Bird Box is dominating pop culture because Netflix seems to know how to hit the Generation Z sweet spot: make memeable movies, then release them when everyone’s done with school. 

In an age where online troll attacks can literally turn out to be clandestine Russian operations, it’s not surprising that people might be a little freaked out. But this is a movie that sparked a bunch of memes. It’s not that deep.