WhatsApp users on iOS and Android will soon be able to secure their backups to iCloud and Google Drive with end-to-end encryption, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed Friday.
“WhatsApp is the first global messaging service at this scale to offer end-to-end encrypted messaging and backups,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post, “and getting there was a really hard technical challenge that required an entirely new framework for key storage and cloud storage across operating systems.”
That work became public when WABetaInfo reported that the service had started testing end-to-end encrypted backups on Android in July. Now it’s official: WhatsApp users can soon save their chat history to cloud services with fewer worries about privacy. Assuming, of course, that WhatsApp’s implementation of these encrypted backups is free of flaws.
Facebook published a post to its engineering-focused blog discussing WhatsApp’s implementation of end-to-end encrypted backups. That post revealed that WhatsApp users will have two options for encrypting their chat history—a randomly generated 64-digit key or a password saved to a Backup Key Vault.
Backup Key Vaults store passwords in a Hardware Security Module (HSM). Facebook said the vault “will be responsible for enforcing password verification attempts and rendering the key permanently inaccessible after a limited number of unsuccessful attempts to access it,” and that “WhatsApp will know only that a key exists in the HSM. It will not know the key itself.”
The company said “the HSM-based Backup Key Vault service will be geographically distributed across multiple data centers to keep it up and running in case of a data center outage,” too, which is vital for a global service with 2 billion users. More information about how Facebook and WhatsApp have set up end-to-end encrypted backups is available in a new whitepaper.
Facebook said that end-to-end encrypted backups will be available to WhatsApp users on iOS and Android “in the coming weeks.”
Even a short week feels like a long week, you know what I mean? Four days, five days — it’s all the same.
Labor Day? Labor’s for the birds, baby. It’s the weekend and it’s time to relax.
It’s time to Live, Laugh, Love and embrace whatever other phrases the Cursive Words On Suburban Walls Industrial Complex is churning out these days. Bless This Mess. Welcome To Our Home. This Is Our Happy Place. Eat. Love. Get Off My Lawn.
Anyway, it’s the weekend. And to kick it off, let’s laugh at some good tweets from the past seven days. You deserve a chuckle.
Here they are, the 14 best tweets of the week.
1. We all should do it but I will go last
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2. Ram into me for all I care
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3. That’s right
Tweet may have been deleted
4. Books can be liars sometimes
Tweet may have been deleted
5. The boys are incredibly Back
Tweet may have been deleted
6. A very fine Matrix +I Think You Should Leave mash-up
Tweet may have been deleted
7. I will be auditing this course
Tweet may have been deleted
8. Holy crap
Tweet may have been deleted
9. Obligatory dril tweet
Tweet may have been deleted
10. And another
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11. Shhh, we’re manifesting
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12. Who could’ve foreseen Steve from Blues Clues having a news cycle?
Welcome to Porn Week, Mashable’s annual close up on the business and pleasure of porn.
Porn performer and professional dom King Noire was cast as the first Black male performer at American porn studio Assylum. But when he realised the role would perpetuate a racist stereotype, he asked to be cast in a different role. His request was denied.
The American studio typically casts male performers as doctors or orderlies and female performers as patients at a mental health facility.
“When I get there and tell them I don’t want to be the janitor, I can be an orderly or a doctor like anybody else, they said ‘no it was written this way and we can’t pivot,'” King Noire tells Mashable. “It’s bullshit because it’s really not like they sat there and wrote The Godfather II or some epic film — they wrote three lines. They were just so locked in on their racism that they couldn’t even change it.”
Assylum is now one of the studios King Noire refuses to work with. Mashable reached out to Assylum for comment, but didn’t hear back. He went on to co-found adult production company Royal Fetish Films with partner Jet Setting Jasmine in a bid to instigate change in the industry.
Racist tropes in porn are an industry-wide problem that not only dehumanises the actors cast in those roles, but disseminates ideas and stereotypes rooted in slavery and colonialism. King Noire believes that the issue in the porn industry is a product of the society in which we live.
“I do think that the majority of the roles that are afforded to BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of colour] performers in the adult industry are rooted in racism and colonialism because we live in a racist and colonialist society,” he says.
“The majority of the roles that are afforded to BIPOC performers in the adult industry are rooted in racism and colonialism.”
“The owners of the [porn] companies, the producers, the writers, the directors and even the white performers have a particular perception of people of colour where they think we are either accessories to their lives or they fetishise us in ways that’s then put into the screen,” he adds. “Whether it’s the trope of the Black thug, the spicy Latina, or subservient Asian, these things just get recycled over and over again because none of these people have challenged these perceptions in their minds.”
These tropes are not unique to porn — they are present in mainstream movies and television shows and their existence in the entertainment we consume sustains historic harmful ideas about marginalised people, upholding stereotypes in wider society.
Some porn studios produce so-called “cop porn,” which typically casts women performers as police officers who beat up Black male performers. Performer Ana Foxxx told Cosmopolitan she was cast in a scene that was later titled “black booty points toward the Union” where she knelt on concrete and performed multiple blowjobs on white men wearing Confederate flags. When she later tweeted her support for Black Lives Matter, someone replied saying: “Aren’t you that girl who slept with those guys in racist shirts?” In some studios, Black performers are cast as slaves and white actors as their “masters.” One video titled “All Lives Matter” reportedly featured a white performer who “rehabilitates” a Black woman who he refers to as a “looter.” In the video he gags her and ejaculates on her face, per Cosmopolitan. On top of the racist tropes, videos are given titles featuring racist words and phrases like “ghetto,” “angry Black woman,” “ebony,” and the N-word.
In 2020, Black performers from the adult industry came together to call on porn sites to stop using racist terminology when labelling content, but the racist language used to describe videos continues to be a problem. Not only that, but the way in which many sites are designed means that porn featuring people of colour is resigned to a niche category — most frequently “ebony” or “interracial” or “Asian” — presenting whiteness as default when it comes to sexual desirability.
King Noire says race categories on porn sites is a double-edged sword because the current labels are actually a vast improvement on some of the racist labels that have been used in the past.
“At certain points they might just label us as ‘Black bitch’ or ‘big Black negro dick,’ or whatever the fuck, so things have been a constant fight, a constant struggle to at least be labelled in ways that the majority of our people are like, ‘OK I’m alright with that,'” he explains.
But he feels it’d be a big step in the right direction to label porn purely by the different fetishes or sex acts that people are engaging in and to show the full spectrum of human beings performing these acts.
“Right now, in order for BIPOC folk to get seen they have to be labelled in certain ways and that is unfortunate. We’ve been working on different ways to label our scenes to get them found for what they actually are, whether it be passion or fetish,” he says.
As it stands, King Noire says that even sex act categories like ‘blow job’ will push content featuring white performers to the top.
“‘Blowjob’ is gonna show you a thousand white blowjobs before it ever gets to anybody of colour,” he says.
Racist tropes have consequences
Porn is part of our sexual culture and the tropes that it disseminates do have consequences. Evie Muir, a domestic abuse specialist and racial justice activist, tells me that racist tropes in porn fuel and maintain the hypersexualisation of Black and brown people.
“When I was younger, and I’m talking still in primary school, not even a teenager, a friend of the same age asked me ‘is it true that Black people have bigger clits?'” she tells me. “I didn’t even know what a clit was, yet the hypersexualisation of Black and brown bodies was already reaching me.” Muir says she uses the word “bodies” here deliberately because “that is what hypersexualisation and fetishisation does, it reduces us to bodies, not people.” She adds: “We’re simply bodies to be fucked, explored, conquered, experimented with, exploited.”
“I’ve had people tell me, after and sometimes during sex that they’ve always wanted to shag a Black girl, the expectation that I can twerk for them, the ‘I only fancy Black girls’ nonsense,” Muir adds. “Where do we think this comes from? It’s from the legacy of hypersexualisation of Black women in colonialism and slavery (look no further than Sarah Baartman) which is being regurgitated through the porn industry.” Sarah Baartman was a South African Khoikhoi woman who was brought to Europe in the 19th century by a British doctor and given the stage name “Hottentot Venus” and paraded at Victorian “freak shows” in London and Paris because of her steatopygia (a condition which causes large amounts of tissue on the buttocks and thighs).
“When was the last time you saw a ‘make love’ porn that featured Black people?”
Porn is designed to entertain and portray people’s wildest sexual fantasies. But when those fantasies feed into pejorative stereotypes that are rooted in people of colour’s historical oppression, the effect can be highly dehumanising.
“The racist tropes in porn portray Black women as easy, always game, more tolerant of pain, submissive, controllable,” says Muir. “They portray Black men as hypermasculine, brutes who are nothing more than fucking machines, who dominate, corrupt and steal the virtue of white women. We are exotic, animalistic, insatiable, forbidden fruit, a secret desire to be ashamed of, not worthy of respect and undeserving of tenderness.” Muir asks, “When was the last time you saw a ‘make love’ porn that featured Black people?”
These racist tropes in porn translate into the lived experiences of racialised people, she adds.
“Navigating our own sexualities amongst these tropes is painful exploration, which it’s impossible to not get hurt by.”
Muir agrees that race categories like “ebony” and “Asian” on porn sites contribute to the othering of people of colour, fueling the idea that whiteness is the pinnacle of desirability. Categories like BBC [“Big Black Cock”] perpetuate the historic hypersexualisation of Black men’s bodies. The “Black people have bigger dicks” is a prevalent trope that’s rooted in ideas that began to be spread during the Elizabethan period when white European colonisers voyaged to Africa and wrote accounts — often with a lot more fantasy than fact — of their travels. African men were “furnisht with such members as are after a sort burthensome unto them,” claimed one writer at the time.
How to shift power and make change
So, what needs to change? “Everything,” says King Noire. That starts with who owns the content.
“I think performers owning their own content and being able to push it out to the people in ways that they want to label themselves…and how they want their content to be represented and consumed is already one of the changes,” says King Noire. “You’re starting to see a lot of power shift away from some of these studios as performers get more of the power in their own hands.”
With his own production company, Royal Fetish Films, King Noire says he’s worked to get people behind the camera who’d typically be more marginalised by mainstream porn. “So making sure that there are women camerapeople, directors, writers, queer folk, BIPOC people across the board,” he says. “Most porn is from the white male gaze so you’re gonna see different things if you put that camera in the hands of different people. We’ve been working to try and make sure that people can see the visions of a lot of different people and desires played out on film instead of just the same old narrative.”
“It’s a lot to tell porn not to be racist, when the people who create porn in their everyday life are racist everywhere else.”
King Noire says that porn is a microcosm of larger society. “It’s a lot to tell porn not to be racist, when the people who create porn in their everyday life are racist everywhere else, they’re only gonna bring that shit to work, it’s the same as any other profession,” he says. “That’s why we’ve been working to decolonise sex among our own people because you can’t wait and rely on the person that hates you, the person that oppresses you to change anything in your favour. You have to take control of it.”
Muir echoes that racism in porn is a societal problem and therefore change needs to be enacted across every level of society. “An anti-racist ethos needs to be embedded in the porn industry, the criminal justice sector, the sexual and domestic violence sector, medical and sexual health care, trauma and mental health support, sex education and beyond,” she says. “All of these are interlinked, and a centering of whiteness in all of these sectors contribute to the harm which hypersexualisation and fetishisation causes, be it through action or inaction.”
Muir believes the only way to start undoing hypersexualisation and fetishisation is by listening to and platforming Black and brown sex workers, as well as sexual justice and sexual liberation activists.
“White people within the movement do not and can not have all the answers,” she says.
SEE ALSO:
How to recognize if you’re being racially gaslighted
Should conversations around antiracism also discuss the role porn plays in perpetuating racism? Muir urges caution in placing the responsibility of change on the shoulders of racial justice activists.
“I think an expectation that we as racial justice activists should be able to cover all forms of racialised harm in our work is harmful. It’s also impractical,” she says “When we are expected to focus on all forms of racialised injustice we reach activist burn out.” She says that more powerful activism comes from a large movement with mobilisers who are dedicated, engaged, and passionate about specific areas. “It doesn’t mean that racial justice activists who focus on climate action can’t also care about sexual justice, it’s likely that we will, but we don’t want to see movements diluted by being the jack-of-all trades, the experts-in-all-forms, that outside eyes often expect us to be,” she says.
It’s not the antiracism movement that needs to change from within, she notes. White people wield the most power in the industry; allyship within the porn industry is necessary for any tangible change to occur.
“Is it not white people who are the main owners and benefactors of the porn industry? White porn stars who get paid more? White sex workers who dominate discussions on sex worker rights and liberation? It needs to be these communities, both allies and perpetrators of this very specific type of racialised, sexualised harm that are stopping, listening, platforming, advocating, and ultimately changing the sector with the power and racialised privileges they possess,” she says.
People of colour have been trying to change the industry from within, from campaigning to change the language that’s used to describe films they’re in to setting up their own studios to produce porn that spotlights new perspectives.
But they can’t bring about change on their own.
As consumers of porn, it’s important to recognise that racist porn is supplied when there is a demand for it. White consumers also play a role in looking inward and making sure they are conscious of what porn they support and avoid hypersexualising the people they have sex with.
As long as people are consuming porn with racist tropes, the supply will continue. And let’s not forget, supply influences demand, too.
“Things have to be combatted and changed on every level,” says King Noire.
Keep reading
What can — or should — we learn from porn
The best virtual reality porn games, and how to play adult VR
Seeing more dicks on TV? Here’s why.
Pornhub deleted millions of videos. And then what happened?
Don’t trust anything on the internet — until Mashable tries it first. Welcome to theHype Test, where we review viral trends and tell you what’s really worth millions of likes.
I’ve practically become a short-order egg cook during the pandemic.
I eat two meals most days while working from home. There’s dinner and a meal around 11 a.m., which is typically either a salad or, far more frequently, something with an egg. Some days that’s a couple of crispy fried eggs. Other days, it’s reheated leftovers topped with an over-easy egg, the runny yolk functioning as a sauce. I’ll mix in a scramble every now and again.
That’s to say I enjoy eating eggs and I’m quite practiced at cooking them. So this TikTok hack interested me. Basically, you airfry a piece of bread topped with an egg and, in some cases, other toppings. It promised to make a quick, tasty egg sandwich without much work.
I decided to give it a whirl. I tried out a viral version that had bacon on top as well as a plain egg on toast.
Here’s the main recipe I was working from, via the TikTok account emillyrosax3, although lots of folks have done a version of the egg toast.
All the TikTok showed was airfrying toast with an egg, a slice of bacon, salt, and pepper. Via the comments, I learned it was airfryed at 400 degrees for seven minutes.
Here’s what the egg hack looked like on TikTok. Credit: TikTok / @emillyrosax3
In my egg toast adventure, I sprayed the grate in my air fryer with Pam, then nestled two slices of plain white bread in the basket. Using a trick I saw in other TikToks, I indented the center of my bread so the yolks would have a small, cupped resting spot. You definitely don’t want the egg to slide off mid cook.
Egg crater. Credit: mashable / tim marcin
Then, simply enough, I cracked two eggs in my toast, seasoned with salt and pepper, then layered a slice of bacon on top of one of the slices of bread.
Two side notes. One: Both of my eggs were double yolkers. Cool. And two: I layered my slice of bacon more neatly than the TikTok showed, portioning it up for total toast coverage. I recommend this method.
You’ve gotta be yolking me with these eggs. Credit: Mashable / tim marcin
Neat and orderly bacon is key. Credit: Mashable / tim marcin
If I’m being honest, I did not have high hopes for this recipe. Part of being a good cook is timing. Different foods take different amounts of time and temperatures to cook properly. Bacon, typically speaking, is going to cook slower than toast or eggs. I expected to have burnt toast, undercooked bacon, and rock-hard eggs. I was wrong, for the most part.
I was pleasantly surprised with my results after blasting the airfryer for seven minutes at 400 degrees.
Notice a bit of egg white ran off the side of one piece of toast. Credit: mashable / tim marcin
The bread wasn’t burnt, just very, very toasted. The bacon was, for the most part, pretty crispy. It had also rendered a bit of tasty fat on the egg and bread. The eggs cooked to all hell but they looked appetizing enough. Here’s what it looked like it plated up with hot sauce and then cut so you could see a cross section.
If you don’t eat Valentina hot sauce, you should. Credit: Mashable / tim marcin
Notice the yolk is overcooked and darker in spots. Credit: mashable / tim marcin
The toast was crunchy. The bacon was crispy and cooked through, though if you had super thick cut bacon that might not be the case. The egg was, in spots, overcooked. The yolk in the non-bacon toast had hardened more than you’d like, turning a shade of orange rather than a pleasant yellow. But the crispy bits of egg white on top of the toast were actually pretty good and reminiscent of egg fried on high heat.
All in all, I’d describe the recipe as pretty good. In a pinch, it’s a decent, fast breakfast. It’s like an egg-in-a-hole without the runny egg, but with almost no effort. If you’re pressed for time, working from home, it’s not a bad option at all.
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Before pro wrestling superstar CM Punk walked out to the ring in front of a sold out crowd at Chicago’s United Center on Friday, Aug. 20, fans were already chanting his name.
“CM PUNK! CM PUNK!”
These chants are not unheard of at pro wrestling events. Punk is a fan favorite among the hardcore wrestling faithful. However, for the past seven years, those chants would go unheeded.
Fans would clamor for CM Punk, but he would not appear.
Punk seemingly, and abruptly, retired from pro wrestling in 2014 after a very public falling out with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). As the years went by, he insisted and further cemented in interviews that he’s not looking to return. Fans had to contend with the fact that maybe Punk was really done wrestling.
Yet, they knew he was going to walk out at All Elite Wrestling’s (AEW) televised Rampage show that Friday night, more than seven years after he walked away from the business.
How?
Because the news of Punk’s return was spoiled on the internet, leaking all across social media nearly a full month earlier.
Social media leaks, TV rating success
In a previous era, a leak like this in the wrestling industry could’ve changed a company’s plans. AEW instead embraced the idea that everyone knew Punk signed with them instead of his old WWE stomping ground and was returning to TV in his hometown of Chicago.
“The news exploded online and it was impossible to ignore,” said Sean Ross Sapp, managing editor of pro wrestling news site, Fightful, who broke the story.
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When the camera started rolling with fans chanting his name, AEW opened the show with Punk walking out and addressing his return. Fans expected what could have been the surprise of the decade. So, AEW just went ahead and delivered it. The company never explicitly said Punk was debuting, social media was doing that for them.
More than a million people tuned in. Perhaps, if it was an unexpected surprise, many who watched it live that night wouldn’t have. That episode of Rampage scored the highest ratings for AEW since the upstart wrestling promotion premiered AEW: Dynamite on television in October 2019, according to Nielsen. Wrestling YouTuber Denise Salcedo noticed that “CM Punk” related trending topics took over social media platforms like Twitter.
Tweet may have been deleted
As journalist David Bixenspan pointed out, Google’s search trends showed that CM Punk’s return to pro wrestling even outperformed WWE’s second biggest show of the year, SummerSlam, which was just days after Punk’s AEW debut.
WWE’s event had two surprises of its own: The returns of Brock Lesnar and Becky Lynch. The two had been away from the ring for more than a year and their SummerSlam appearances had not been leaked in advance.
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The leak absolutely worked in AEW’s favor.
In an online conversation with Mashable, Sapp explained how AEW adapted to the fact that everyone knew Punk was returning.
“Leaning into it was a really smart business move on AEW’s part,” he said.
The dirt sheets
Leaks are not a new phenomenon in pro wrestling. Even with all the drama found in the scripted storylines and predetermined matches played out on your TV set, oftentimes the juiciest stories in wrestling are the real-life business dealings and politicking found backstage.
Pro wrestlers work to map out athletic showcases and create compelling characters in order to draw larger crowds and work their way to main event level matches. Wrestling promotions compete to sign the hottest new talent and lure established superstars over from their competitors.
Decades before social media and the internet, wrestling superfans would seek out physical newsletters dishing the latest in behind-the-scenes wrestling news. Dave Meltzer’s popular Wrestling Observer Newsletter, which began publishing in print in 1982, is probably the earliest example of these wrestling publications.
Those working in the business, however, often referred to these outlets derogatorily as “dirt sheets.” They looked at people like Meltzer, a credible legitimate journalist, as lifting the curtain on an industry that looks at itself in the same way a magician never reveals how magic tricks work.
As Sapp of Fightful explained to me, a wrestler addressing what was printed in the dirt sheets was “something that was seen as taboo for years.” That’s not the case anymore. Nowadays, it’s not out of the ordinary for talent to acknowledge leaked information. Sometimes they’ll do it outright with a written post. Other times they may subtly hint at the details with no more than a relevant .GIF.
In the late ’90s, pro wrestling entered what is arguably viewed as its biggest boom. World Championship Wrestling (WCW), backed by television magnate Ted Turner, provided industry leader WWE, then known as WWF, with some of the strongest competition it ever encountered. Known in the wrestling business as The Monday Night Wars, for years both companies aired its flagship TV programs – WWE Raw and WCW Nitro – on Monday nights and went head-to-head in the television ratings.
It just so happened that dial-up internet was rolling out in households across the country during this time period too. So, “dirt sheets” made their way online, too. Backstage wrestling news started to spread quicker and easier than ever before. When talent would jump from WWE to WCW, or vice versa, the news would leak.
Perhaps the most notorious leak during this time period came in Jan. 1999.
During this time, WWE would sometimes pre-tape Raw in advance. And thanks to the internet, the results would leak. On this particular episode of Raw, wrestler Mick Foley, often booked as a lovable underdog, would win the WWE title. Over on the live WCW Nitro, commentator Tony Schiavone would leak Foley’s title win spoiler in an effort to mock their competitor’s creative decision.
More than half a million WCW viewers would change the channel over to Raw to catch Foley’s long-sought victory. This is often viewed as a pivotal moment in the Monday Night Wars, which ended in March 2001 with WWE purchasing WCW.
The modern era
As the internet matured and the wrestling landscape changed with the consolidation of the big promotions, the dirt sheets evolved too.
“For a long time, the Wrestling Observer site didn’t do that much traffic,” David Bixenspan explained to me.
Bixenspan says that over the past decade, pro wrestling news outlets formed during the age of the internet, creating content specifically for the internet that would flourish and set the stage for how backstage news would spread in the modern era.
This was a “byproduct of the SEO revolution that happened a decade or so ago,” Bixenspan explained, referring to how important search engines and social media became in the discovery of content.
As wrestling sites blew up online, the wrestling organizations had to adapt to the proliferation of leaks as well.
“AEW largely tries to be more like a regular sports league,” says Bixenspan. The company holds press conferences with the media and is fairly open about addressing news and rumors that have been made public.
“WWE makes efforts [to stop leaks], but it’s such a big company, so many people have to know what is going on at any given time,” Sapp tells me.
Sometimes, plans will change and it’s assumed it’s because of leaks.
“A recent example was a story regarding Sonya Deville possibly returning to the ring,” Sapp told me. “WWE had Money in the Bank graphics produced for her and all.”
While Deville appeared at the event in her usual on-screen role, she did not wrestle as the leaks had claimed she would.
“A WWE rep simply told me they ‘jumped the gun’ on that,” Sapp said.
Sapp further explained that most of the time company representatives won’t be so forthcoming, outright lie, or simply not respond when he reaches out to confirm leaks from sources.
On the contrary, if WWE – a company that’s heavily invested in social media – feels like a leak getting out could be a net positive for them, they’ll lean into it as well.
When wrestling legend Bill Goldberg returned to WWE over the summer, Sapp “got the feeling that they wanted the online buzz of a major star popping up.” When he reached out to them at that time, WWE confirmed his story pretty quickly.
But just because the wrestling companies have learned to live with more information getting out in the age of social media, there’s still plenty of risk involved for the source of the leaks.
Last year, AEW superstar Chris Jericho confirmed that the company discovered the source of a major backstage leak involving the debut of an on-screen talent.
“We know who the spy is, by the way. Oh, we know. He’ll never fucking be back in AEW,” Jericho shared on a livestream.
Leaks then, now, forever…
This past Sunday, just a few weeks after his return to wrestling, CM Punk had his first match in seven years, defeating Darby Allin at AEW’s All Out pay-per-view event.
At the end of the event, Bryan Danielson, a former WWE World Champion, walked out on the entrance ramp and debuted for AEW. He had just jumped ship from WWE to their newest big competitor.
Again, this could have been a huge surprise. A little over a month earlier, though, on the same day Fightful reported that CM Punk looked to be headed to AEW for his return to wrestling, another wrestling site, Bodyslam.net, leaked the news that Danielson had just signed with the company as well.
Tweet may have been deleted
Once again, however, the leaks may have worked in the company’s favor. Wrestling fans who expected a “surprise” bought the $50 All Out PPV. According to AEW owner Tony Khan, the All Out event was the most-watched PPV in the company’s history. While the exact buy rate has yet to be released, it’s estimated to nearly double last year’s 90,000 PPV buys.
“By far, wrestling companies are more accepting of the possibility of leaks getting out,” Sapp told me. “They’ve learned to simply work alongside the buzz created by leaks.”
So, as long as there’s fans searching out for the latest news online and the dirt sheets there to write them up, the leaks will continue to flow in professional wrestling.
On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that Epic Games, maker of Fortnite, could direct iOS users to a third-party site to make in-app purchases. Apple tried to force the company to exclusively use its App Store.
The ruling from Northern California District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers doesn’t just apply to Epic Games. It says Apple can no longer prohibit any developer from including links in its apps that direct users away from the App Store.
Apple kicked Fortnite out of the App Store in August of 2020, after a coordinated effort by Epic Games to provide users with a non-Apple payment option for “V-bucks,” which can be used in the game to buy digital goods like character outfits.
However, lest you think Epic Games is fully rocking a Fortnite dance, the court also ruled that Epic Games owes Apple a ton of cash: 30 percent of the more than $12 million in revenue it collected through direct payments from iOS users between August and October of 2020. Epic Games also needs to pay 30 percent of the revenue it took in through its Epic Direct Payments network — that is, outside of the App Store — from iOS users from Nov. 1, 2020, through Sept. 10, 2021.
SEE ALSO: How to encrypt your computer (and why you should)
While the decision may seem huge, the conflicts at the heart of the court case are likely far from settled. That’s because, as CNBC reports, legal experts expect this decision to be appealed and the injunction against Apple doesn’t go into effect until December.
First there was chicken log. Then there was beef candle. And then there was meatball candle.
You might be thinking, “This can’t possibly be a thing.” But it is. In recent years, KFC, McDonalds, and IKEA have injected the smells of their iconic meat dishes into products that aren’t meat. Sure!
The allure of the meat scents is a little unclear. Maybe buyers are in it for the novelty, lighting up their meat log once and then banishing it to their deepest cabinet. Maybe people are into the sheer weirdness of it all, the same way they just had to try mac-and-cheese flavored ice cream. And maybe there are people out there who simply love the stench of a mall food court, but only when there is no food in sight.
But what exactly is appealing about smelling meat out of context? Why might people buy these olfactory Frankensteins? And is it morally wrong to subject your houseguests to a thick, beefy haze?
Meat scents: Let’s dig in.
11 herbs and memories
As we’ve known for quite a while now, brands are constantly capitalizing on… well, everything. Wherever there are potential customers who might make a purchase, the brands will be at work.
Consider the KFC chicken log, which is basically a Duraflame starter log designed to smell like a hunk of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The brand didn’t just start selling it as a joke for its own sake — it was betting on a psychological response.
“The creation of the iconic 11 Herbs & Spices Firelog was based on research reported in Psychology Today, stating that smells trigger areas in the brain strongly linked to memory,” a KFC spokesperson said in an email. “In 2018, when we launched the iconic gift for the first time, we wanted to take that insight and give customers a way to celebrate their love of fried chicken while enjoying the holidays with family, friends, significant others, in-laws, or bizarre extended family in a uniquely KFC way.”
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Ah yes, the holidays. The time of year when we gather with our loved ones to light up a chicken stick.
But the brands are onto something when it comes to linking smell and memory to influence consumer decisions. “When people experience things in their lives, the olfactory component tends to help form those memories very tightly,” said Kara Hoover, a biological anthropologist and professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks who specializes in olfactory evolution. “So when you smell something, it evokes the memory and evokes how you were feeling at the time. Whether it was good or bad, it doesn’t matter.”
From Hoover’s perspective, scented products are a way to infiltrate the consumer’s household even more — a way to reinforce a brand experience outside their place of business. This method of advertising has become more popular since the start of the pandemic, she said, especially when quarantine restrictions were at their heaviest and people were often unable to go to businesses in person.
Happy holidays. Credit: KFC
Global emergencies aside, Hoover has noticed a growing interest in olfactory experiences over the past decade, specifically in the VR gaming and porn industries.
“I think one of the first successful [olfactory experiments], weirdly enough, was porn, so that you could smell the sex you were having,” she said. The idea is that people want their favorite experiences at the ready in the most “authentic” way possible — whether that experience is sex or a Quarter Pounder with cheese.
Hoover also has a warning for brands, though: This can backfire. “As soon as you put that [scent] in your home, the experience you have is out of [the brand’s] control, and it may become negatively associated for individuals. So it seems like you’re losing a lot of your market control by allowing it into the home,” she said.
In other words, bad memories can be made just as easily as good ones when you’re smelling meat. If you’re thinking about how a certain piece of chicken wood ruined your fireplace every time you patronize your local KFC, you might think twice about waiting in line for that 10-piece feast.
The reaction is the point
The scents themselves are only one piece of the puzzle. People likely aren’t buying beef candles to make their home smell like a McDouble. They’re buying beef candles because beef candles are super weird and everyone keeps saying “beef candle” on Twitter. (The beef candles were also part of a limited edition set, so prospective buyers didn’t have much time to decide whether they were actually a good buy or not.)
Brands release bizarre “conversation starter” products for a reason. Memes, retweets, and inside jokes between friends are all part of the cycle of virality that gets us to consume — en masse — stuff we probably don’t need. (See the “TikTok made me buy it” trend.)
“What in the Kentucky fried fuck is this,” one Reddit user on r/mildlyinteresting said of the chicken log. It smelled, according to a user on r/ofcoursethatsathing, “kind of like strong vitamins mixed with cardboard.” Someone on r/Flipping pled with anyone thinking about purchasing the deep-fried monstrosity, saying “I WOULD STRONGLY ADVISE AGAINST IT. These things will stink up your house. I haven’t had mine for days and my room still smells like them. I mean STRONG, whole large room smell. The items I had near it smell like it.” Powerful stuff.
We may be talking about how sickening these products are, but we’re still talking about them. They become a phenomenon to participate in — people with particularly online groups of friends might even snag a few extras to use as gag gifts. It’s merch, but smelly.
An ironic or tongue-in-cheek purchase, after all, is still a purchase, and The Brands™ have become pretty proficient at employing the language of memes to sell us stuff. Take Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina candle, which was roundly mocked online and in plenty of articles: It sold out. Take the uncomfortably self-aware Steak-umms Twitter account: It (successfully) harnessed Depression Twitter to sell frozen meat.
And the stinky, unpleasant chicken logs sell like hotcakes every time they get restocked. The KFC spokesperson told Mashable that the logs “sold out within hours two years in a row, secured a retail partnership with Walmart in 2019, and even expanded into the Canadian market in 2020.”
Simply put, a product’s virality can greatly affect the purchasing decisions of consumers, and brands know it. Weird shit gets talked about, and weird shit sells — especially if it also smells.
Personally, I would like to keep my meat scents in-store, but I won’t judge you if you want to take the IKEA meatball experience home with you. Just don’t invite me over if you have that candle lit.
With 24 hours left to live, a highly-trained assassin seeks to solve and avenge her own murder. That’s the action-packed premise Mary Elizabeth Winstead takes on in Netflix’s Kate — a so-so thriller made immeasurably better by the fearless star’s do-or-die performance.
Set against the backdrop of neon-drenched Tokyo nightlife, this hyper-condensed whodunnit kicks off with the titular hitwoman discovering she’s been poisoned. Polonium-204, a doctor explains, is responsible for Kate’s sudden headaches and vomiting. But these are just the first symptoms of acute radiation syndrome, the brutal condition that will put Kate in agonizing pain as her body rapidly deteriorates in a day or less.
Over the next 1 hour and 46 minutes of screentime, Kate methodically hunts for her killer among a group of Yakuza she suspects are responsible for dosing her with the toxin. Winsetad’s remarkably stoic performance matches the cool detachment of her character’s approach to certain death, and lays the ground for one stark revenge arc. From the moment Kate starts yanking rotted, bloody teeth from her head in a dirty public restroom, Winstead makes it clear: She’s playing a spectacularly screwed dead woman walking, not the face of a new multi-film franchise.
Go get ’em. Credit: Jasin Boland/NETFLIX
That grim premise and the remarkably stagnant tone with which it is explored make for a surprisingly weak narrative. Kate’s rushing through the streets, although bloody and badass, fails to achieve an organic pace — playing more like a clunky collection than serpentine sequence. Why she’s chosen vengeance and not to either (a) stay at the hospital where she can pass in peace, or (b) pull up a stool at the nearest bar and get drunk is never made clear. She’s neither motivated enough nor ridiculous enough to make her quest for comeuppance feel like a reasonable effort to undertake. It’s justified sure, just not compelling.
Ostensibly in an effort to fix that, the niece of a powerful Yakuza leader named Ani, played by Miku Martineau, is forced into the adventure as a conduit for musings on loss of innocence and family betrayal. It could work. And yet, not only have you seen this multi-generational tale of trauma before, but it comes off as seriously cloying in this context. Think Hanna (2011), but worse — at no fault of Martineau’s. It’s simply not written well, with the duo’s dynamic shifting inexplicably from scene to scene and, in some rougher moments, from line to line.
Yeah, seems like ya got ’em. Credit: Jasin Boland/NETFLIX
The final acts are overwrought with exposition. The dialogue isn’t compelling. Even Kate’s well-placed sparks of dark comedy, including a Zombieland Twinkies-style quest for a soda called “Boom Boom Lemon,” feel bloated as the story drags on. Still, I can’t help but recommend this movie to those who love its star.
Winstead without question leaves it all on screen for this project, delivering gritty fight and chase sequences that will have your eyes fixed on her for every frame. Precise punches paired with frenetic-but-not-frantic looks make her approach to action stardom work like a Huntress-John Wick hybrid. Winstead makes Kate infinitely more interesting by nailing slick choreography without sacrificing the facial expressions needed to sell her thought process.
Of course, we’ve seen her do that in past films. But the titular role of Kate gives us an exciting glimpse into what the effervescent actor could do with a better movie. She’s got the tenacity and talent to carry a title this dark and this gruesome. She just couldn’t get this one up to her level.
The experience of playing a Warioware game is unique among console experiences. Instead of presenting involved party games or puzzles that require critical thinking, dexterous mechanical reasoning, and reading comprehension, Warioware chucks players into a chaotic world where one-word commands, five-second-countdowns, and visual cues are all anyone needs to succeed.
At its best, the new Warioware: Get it Together! for the Nintendo Switch perfectly captures that frenetic microgame energy and guides players into a lizard-brained, reflexive state of play that’s both reactive and oddly meditative. Its premise, that Wario and his employees at his game studio are trapped in a bugged version of their new game release and have to battle through their game to fix it, is an adequate backdrop for the hundreds of games packed into its main plot — but after a player comes down from the high of having played each game once, it’s difficult to recapture the game-debugging fun in later plays.
Squad Goals
Sometimes a family is a game developer, a scientist, his robot, two ninja children, and an alien. Credit: Courtesy of nintendo
Unlike previous Warioware games, character selection is key in Warioware: Get it Together! Every member of Wario’s team has a different power that makes them act differently in microgames, and the main thrust of the plot is discovering where in the game Wario’s employees have scattered and how to use their individual strengths.
There’s really only a handful of actions that are useful in the microgames, so most characters are a variation on one of four themes: flying, attacking, jumping, and throwing. Some of the characters (Wario, Mona, Ashley, Orbulon) combine two of those variations, and they are God-tier useful when it comes to solving microgames.
Other characters do a gimmicky version of one of those themes and they, with respect, belong crammed together in a clown car. These are characters like Kat and Ana, who jump continuously as if the ground is their personal trampoline and are difficult to control, 18-Volt, who is completely stationary but can toss CDs from his head (for some reason?), and Jimmy T, who just kind of disco-thrusts everywhere.
Welcome To The Stacked Arcade
Look at all these levels! Credit: Courtesy of Nintendo
What partially redeems even the clown car characters is their introductions and individual level designs. Each character encountered in the Warioware: Get it Together! plot is introduced with a charming animated cinematic and a themed level that serves as the stage for a set of new microgames. These levels, which are meant to be the game levels each character designed for Wario’s game, are wonderfully kinetic and eye-catching, with great music (including one sung-through vocal theme that is an indisputable bop) and strong visual cues for success or failure.
For example, Dr. Crygor’s level is a lab where he manufactures cute robots that cheer when a player does well, Orbulon sets games in cultural landmarks from around the world, 9-Volt gets an objectively awesome Nintendo-themed level that brings in characters from Splatoon and Breath of the Wild, and so on. The microgames in each level all stick to their theme and are fun when played in rapid succession, but it’s also fun to mix them up in later challenges that draw from all the characters’ worlds.
Honey, I Shrunk The Games
Smooth as a statue. Wait. Credit: Courtesy of Nintendo
The microgames themselves are wacky and chaotic as ever, ranging from hiding a cat turd in a litter box to plucking the armpit hair of a buff giant, though some of them are too vague in their one or two–word instructions and take a few tries to figure out what exactly the game wants you to do. The games’ rapidfire pace requires instantaneous and often reflexive comprehension as opposed to intense puzzle solving, and building a long streak of wins in a row is incredibly satisfying. Even if you do whiff it on one game in the final stages of a level, the price for starting over is nil and starting from the point of loss is a cheap 100 coins.
Some microgames are better suited for characters with a particular skill set like flying or shooting upwards, which would be fine if it weren’t borderline impossible to complete them with some of the other characters. Getting a bad roll that mismatches a character to the type of micrograms selected is a guaranteed loss, which makes those characters dead weight in a microgame level roster. Since Warioware: Get it Together! doesn’t tell players which games they’ll get in any given level, it eventually becomes useless to waste time stocking any of the clown car–tier characters and more likely that players will simply reuse the more mobile ones.
Players aiming for high scores and earning oodles of coins may enjoy later challenges, but those seeking novelty will get bored quickly.
Phone A Friend
You’re goin’ down, Wario. Credit: Courtesy of Nintendo
Warioware: Get it Together! also offers a selection of multiplayer games for two-to-four players. Some of them, especially those that revolve around racing through the completion of microgames in competition with a friend, are solidly entertaining experiences that at least feel different every time you play them. Others, like a cooperative keepy-uppy game with a bouncing ball and an interminable side-scroller that involves picking up game contracts and avoiding evil pigs (?) are less replayable.
On the good side is Balloon Bang, which challenges one player to complete a microgame while the other attempts to inflate a giant balloon that could pop at any moment and is hilariously stressful, Puck ‘er Up, which is a combination of air hockey and evil as players must score a goal for the chance to complete a microgame that their opponent can sabotage, and the two modes that allow players to go head-to-head in a microgame race (Duelius Maximus and Rising Star).
Those games have the most replay value, especially if you rotate in new friends when someone is knocked out, but even they lose their shine after a few rounds. After going through the entire Variety Pack roster of multiplayer games with the same friend, there isn’t much motivation to go through and play them all again. That lack of impetus to keep going after you’ve seen everything at least once is the overarching issue with Warioware: Get it Together! Players aiming for high scores and earning oodles of coins may enjoy later challenges, but those seeking novelty will get bored quickly.
In The Endgame Now
Fight your friends and family, if you like. Credit: courtesy of Nintendo
After completing the main plot of Warioware: Get it Together!, there’s technically plenty for players to do. There’s a big chunk of postgame content (which really just feels like the final levels of the game, just set after the credits), competing in the Wario Cup, and a whole convoluted system of using coins to buy “Prezzies” to customize and level up characters, but the game doesn’t give a good reason why anyone should bother going that hard on the endgame.
Again, some players thrive on racking up stars and high scores, and those players will love the Wario Cup and the new online Ranked Mode that allows them to compare scores with their friends via Nintendo Switch Online (subscription required), but for those who don’t have a completionist bone in their body, this game feels kind of done when it’s done.
It took maybe three hours to complete the main plot of Warioware: Get it Together!, and another one and a half to squeeze the remaining fun out of the multiplayer sections. Some people who get more serotonin out of completing fast microgames even if they’ve played them dozens of times before will get more use out of the game as a whole, but others will find that Warioware: Get it Together! is more of a toy than a game — you pick it up, see what it can do, and forget about it when something new comes out.
Warioware: Get it Together! is out on the Nintendo Switch.
