Gilberto Sanchez made a mistake: he bought a movie from a street vendor, probably because he thought they were joking when they said they had “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”. Then he saw it was a preproduction cut of the movie, and uploaded it to the Internet.

Now, here’s something to ask yourself: Sanchez was quite obviously not the guy who stole the preproduction cut. He was just the guy who put it on the Internet. Obviously somebody else stole the cut. So the people who actually stole, and pirated, the movie for profit, and not the guy who uploaded it to the Internet, should be spending a year in jail, right?

Wrong, according to the U.S. government. Sanchez gets a year of jail time.

Here’s our question: the judge had to see the movie, and it didn’t occur to the court that maybe the producer should be put in jail? That thing was a crime against comics, art, good taste and possibly humanity. As long as we’re handing out jail sentences on light pretexts, let’s punish some of the genuinely guilty.

[ via the pirate hunters at Electronista ]

ABC is reporting cases of seizures related to photosensitive epilepsy being triggered by the childbirth scene in Twilight: Breaking Dawn, which opened this weekend. The scene in question is the one in which Edward bites Snorkels The Vampire Fetus out of Bella after she breaks her spine, and this isn’t a spoiler of any plot points because YOU SHOULDN’T CARE. In the scene, bright flashes of red, black, and white appear on screen (totally original color scheme, bro), and it is this combination and the speed of the flashing which is being blamed for seizures. Because apparently despite the fact that photosensitive epilepsy is pretty common (one out of every four thousand people), they still didn’t bother with one simple Harding Test before releasing the movie worldwide. Oh, sparkly vampires, will you ever stop sucking?

And now, some specific examples of seizures reported so far:

A California man, Brandon Gephart, was reportedly rushed to the hospital after getting sick while watching Breaking Dawn’s birth scene. The screening ended when paramedics arrived to help Gephart. “He was convulsing, snorting, trying to breathe,” Gephart’s girlfriend Kelly Bauman told CBS Sacramento. “He scared me big time.” Gephart admitted that he has no interest in seeing how the movie ends. [THR, emphasis mine]

Hmm, boyfriend with photosensitive epilepsy, or man of genius who figured out how to get out of seeing the whole movie? Your call, internet.

In Utah, a married couple told ABC-4 in Salt Lake City that bright, graphic scene caused the husband, who doesn’t want to be named for fear he could lose his job, to pass out and led to his entire body shaking. “I didn’t really remember what happened after that I think I blacked out. According to her, I was shaking and mumbling different noises,” he told ABC-4. [ABC, emphasis mine]

Is he afraid of losing his job because they might find out he had a medical issue, or because they might find out he went to a screening of Twilight? We’re thinking the latter.

[Sources: ABC4 via THR, ABC via io9, Pleated-Jeans]

When not euthanizing animals and objectifying women, PETA found time to call Mario — a fictional character — a murderer with their Mario Kills Tanooki campaign. (Least objective opening sentence? Probably. And we’re certainly not guilt free when it comes to sexism, but at least we’re not calling ourselves moral crusaders and getting tax-exempt status. We know we’re bastards.) Anyhow, since Tanukis are a real animal and Mario is back in the “Tanooki” suit for Super Mario 3D Land, PETA is attention-whoring again (guess it worked) by calling Mario a murderer and making a flash game about it. You can play the flash game here, but there’s really not much to it. Here’s the screen you see when you get 45 coins and catch Mario:

Just a couple obvious things. First off, Mario isn’t real. “Tanooki” also isn’t a real thing. I didn’t finish a game of Super Mario Bros. 3 as a kid and then go outside looking for Tanukis to skin so I could fly. It didn’t make me want to wear fur or curb stomp a turtle any more than it made me try to flush myself down a toilet in search of coins (only happened once). You guys couldn’t find anything better to nitpick?

Secondly, the Tanooki Suit was a reference to Japanese folklore, where Tanuki is mischievous, jolly, shape-shifting, and a little bit absent-minded. Oh, and he has enormous balls:

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Earlier this week, we reported on idiot parents deciding they know better than doctors, and giving their kids chicken-pox infected lollipops instead of a vaccination. Not unreasonably, a lot of us are baffled on how precisely these people all hopped in the Douche Canoe and paddled it right up Kid-Killing Creek. How can they not pay attention to science? Are they stupid?

This is a question that gets asked a lot. Richard Muller, a prominent climate skeptic, recently released a report that was essentially him eating a lot of crow and stating that he was wrong, climate change was actually happening, and that it turns out that just because he’s a physicist doesn’t mean he understands climatology. But we still have climate change skeptics, and this didn’t slow them down. We still have people screaming that evolution is “just a theory”.

What the heck is going on?

The short answer: your brain doesn’t like being wrong. At all. And it will go to incredible lengths to convince itself it isn’t, even when it is. If science is based on the objective observation of facts, here are five cognitive biases working in our brains, all the time, to keep us from doing exactly that.
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Hey, remember when GameStop saw that copies of “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” were coming with an OnLive coupon, and GameStop would not stand this aggression? So it cracked open every copy, stole the freebie, and then felt the wrath of gamers everywhere? Yeah, they feel really, really bad about that, and want to make it up to you.

How? By giving everybody who bought “Deus Ex” new a $50 gift card, the value of the coupon they threw out, and a Buy Two, Get One Free deal on used games. Two notes:

A) Notice that they’re not giving the coupon back. I think OnLive might have something to say about this, that involves lawyers.

B) Notice that they’re trying to drive you towards their real cash cow, used games.

Oh, GameStop. You’re why I’m buying games from Best Buy.

[ via the dealhunters at Kotaku ]

ABOVE: So the Algonquin Hotel held another cat fashion show this this weekend.

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