Jennifer Lawrence and The Great Fappening

America’s sweetheart had quite the Labor Day weekend. The nudes leaked of Jennifer Lawrence and a bevvy of lesser female stars and models grasped the hardons of most men around the world and still haven’t let go. The instant they exploded from 4Chan on Sunday, the geeks on Reddit created a subreddit devoted to an event so cataclysmic they dubbed it “The Fappening,” a portmanteau of ‘fapping,’ the post-Recession word for jerking off, and ‘happening.’

Has JLaw gone Kardashian on us? Not quite. This will only increase her exposure, so to speak, and her popularity with the demographic that Hollywood salivates over most. If the Lord of the Rings crowd wasn’t exactly storming the box office for Hunger Games before, they will now. Lawrence’s reps doth protest too much, running around online swatting naughty re-posters with cease-and-desist orders and empty threats; in reality, they are thrilled and gloating. The cash cow from whom they skim a percentage just got fatter. And stand back Edward Snowden! Bryan Hamade, the hacker who leaked the nudes, has been canonized overnight, his icon an inflated dickhead with a halo.

Odd Nerdrum One Story Singer

Content Creation: Talking to Yourself Is Healthy

I’m on Reddit about as much as I’m on Facebook. What amazes many other Redditors is we get far more comments and likes for our posts from strangers than we do from actual friends for our posts on Facebook. Your contributions also don’t appear directly on other Redditors’ feeds; you post by subject, or ‘subreddit’, and hope for the best. So why bother posting to Facebook at all? It lost whatever negligible cool it had long ago, after all.

Many of my friends and most of my small family have either never signed up for Facebook or have dropped away. “It’s a waste of time and distracting,” an award-winning writer-director friend, who cancelled his account well over a year ago, said to me the other day. This guy is so cool he can carry off a polo shirt and actually make me hesitate as to whether I might need one or two in my wardrobe as well. (I don’t.)

Butch Cassidy Sundance Kid

When It’s Time to Break Up with a Friend

I’ve been of two minds whether to write this piece for a few weeks now. Writing about relationships of any kind is more Oprah’s purview, but a case may be made that all writing is about a relationship of one form or another. With that self-serving justification in hand, let me proceed.

What finally prompted me to examine the end of friendships—or even putting a friendship on indefinite hiatus; you can never be sure what might happen down the road no matter how final the termination feels—is a close friend of mine called it off with another close friend of his today. There have been epistolary battles via emails for some time now, a veritable bloodbath of character assassinations.

Why Sterling Archer Is My New Straight Boyfriend

I guess I have a bit of explaining to do.  Given that PFC’s demographic apparently skews thirty to forty-five, most of our readers might not be aware of the salty adult animated comedy series Archer currently in its fourth season on FX. (‘Salty’ is my new favorite adjective since our contributor Eric Baker referred to this site that way as a warning to the readers of his own blog before linking them here.) 

Troll Attack SWATH

Reddit Scandal: “Those Meaningless Internet Points”

For my money, the most interesting story this week wasn’t Obama’s unsurprising comeback in the second debate—I’ve always said he plays a street-savvy long game, to laudable effect—but the outing by Gawker of the internet’s most notorious troll, Michael Brutsch, a.k.a. Violentacrez on Reddit.  This brought into the spotlight an issue I have long had with trolling, or making any sort of controversial attack or negative comment online: If you wouldn’t have the balls to say it to my face (or anyone else you are vilifying or degrading) as who you are in real life, you shouldn’t do it online.

Anonymous slander, stalking, offense, intimidation, humiliation et al. is cowardice, pure and simple.  When it becomes harassment and bullying of weaker people, it is downright dangerous—we’ve all heard stories of suicides resulting from the lethal psychological effects of the egregious behavior of what Anderson Cooper calls “little people,” which is the term he used in reference to Brutsch for a special segment on the Reddit scandal.  Anderson is someone I have made fun of myself a few times in these pages, but (almost) always as myself, the notable exception being when I posed as Tom Cruise to offer Anderson advice in The Tom Cruise Guide to Gay Sex in Your 50s.  When I am spoofing a celebrity, which I’ve done twice as Cruise and Lady Gaga, it’s pretty clear to readers that it’s me, and if it isn’t then I will cheerfully own up to it.

Claire Danes Homeland

REPOST: ‘Homeland’: The Co‑Best Show on TV?

UPDATE:  I wasn’t surprised by last night’s upset at the Emmys.  Well, okay, I was—as I mention in the repost of an article below, it’s the first Emmys I’ve ever paid attention to.  I was on the money about Claire Danes, but my hesitation about Damian Lewis cost me a firm call in the Best Actor category.  Had I done my homework and seen that Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad had already won three times, I would have definitely called it for Lewis.

In the end, I guess I’ve been told which show to like better.  Although, to be honest, this season of Breaking Bad is killing it, more so than ever, but it wasn’t eligible for this round of awards.  So, compared to last season, Homeland was the better show.  Or was it?

Here’s the original post: