THE SAVAGE SON

Black History Month!

My favorite parts of history (as might be obvious from my choice of subject matter when making books) are the ones that fall into easily-categorized genres, genres with associated visual iconographies. This is the sort of stuff I loved as a kid: pirates, knights, cowboys, explorers, romans and Egyptians and flying aces. Stuff you could find featured in a bag of toys or a generic costume. For Black History Month, I thought I might visit some of these adventure-leaning periods and pick a few historic black people from those eras to draw, just for fun. If you’re doing a project or report in school this month, you could do worse than to tackle one of these toughies.  Feel free to share some of these with youngsters that you know.  And call them youngsters, they LOVE that.

"Welcome to the real "Game of Thrones" Men’s health Magazine doinge a large article our team, a little about me my our sport

The real Game of Thrones

Get up close and personal with the men who swing head-removing swords for sport

For all the clanging drama of onscreen swordplay, Jon Snow’s thrusts are rendered impressive only by the deft hand of the editing suite. What looks like uninterrupted carnage is really minutely choreographed and then crafted from hundreds of individual shots, each parry, thrust and decapitation prepared and filmed individually before being stitched into a single, blood-bathed battle scene.

But for those who decamp to deserts on the weekend, where they don chainmail and attempt to break each others’ bones with maces that could split your skull, there’s no rehearsals. These are the men of Medieval Combat, a full contact melee that’s exactly as brutal as sounds. In our January issue we travelled to New Mexico to meet them, train with them, and understand why they put their limbs on the line in a sport that’s suffered more than its share of fatalities.

You can get the full story in our new issue, on shelves now, or available digitally here for iOS,Android and Kindle. Before then, check out Andre Sinou of the ACL USA Knights battling at the world championships in Spain. Just remember – don’t try this at home. Unless you’re wearing armour and carrying a broadsword.

ACL USA Knights fight in the IMCF World Championship from TotalWallop on Vimeo.

The first hint: armoured fighting did not look like that.

Statuta Armorum (The Statutes of Arms), c. 1260 From: A. Luders, ed., The Statutes of the Realm: Printed by Command of His Majesty King George the Third, in Pursuance of an Address of the House of Commons of Great Britain, From Original Records and Authentic Manuscripts, 11 vols., (London: Record Commission, 1810-1828), Vol. I, pp. 230-231

But sorry, we're not eviscerating each other so we can't call it "Armored Fighting". Come to New England, put on a kit, and get the stupid beaten out of you by Cat Brooks. I can guarantee you'll feel like a goddamn helpless kitten. Then you can talk about if it's armored fighting or not.

Debbie Harry as Jean Grey

Henry Rollins as Colossus

Iggy Pop as Angel

Johnny Rotten as Ice Man

Glenn Danzig as Wolverine

sunday, december 1st, 2013 punks for pups - a benefit for paws new england:

mr. farenheit notches psychic dog

o’brien’s pub | allston, ma $5 - 10 | 7pm | 21+

And wasn’t it sunny out just a few minutes ago?”

We hope this post is a sharetastic LOLworthy clickwin!

22 Stories We Can’t Believe BuzzFeed Hasn’t Written Yet

Let me first be clear that BuzzFeed has done some very insightful, interesting interviews. And just look at their news section — they do news. But then there’s the other thing. The “19 Reasons Raisins Should Be Put in Jail” and “Is This a Disney Movie?” I understand, of course. Post what people will click on. We all do it. It’s what I’m doing right now. But lately it looks like we’ve run out of things to remember.

I don’t write a lot of the actual articles on Cracked. I pop in for a column every now and then, but mostly I work for the video department. But I am aware of the work that goes into the articles every single day, and I just want to say how insulting it is to see people compare these two things. Look at almost any Buzzfeed article and you’ll see two things: a single sentence followed by a picture or GIF. That’s it. And, yes, they’re about things like 19 Reasons Raisins Should Be Put in Jail.Picture, sentence, picture, sentence, and half the time a lot of the entries have nothing to do with anything and are just filler. Filler within a filler article.

Look at any Cracked feature article and you’ll notice an amazing thing: Paragraphs! Paragraphs followed by more paragraphs, with deeply sourced information and time and patience and thought. Our articles take weeks and months to put together. A pitch will spend months in the workshop being revised, getting new sources, adding entries, removing entries, until the article meets our editors’ standards and is exactly right. There is a quality Cracked has that can only be achieved by time, hard work, and care. And I’m sure the fine people at Buzzfeed are very nice and just as proud of their own work, but it’s so clear to me that there are glaring differences in quality, content, and generally giving a shit. Fun game, guess the website: 5 Bizarre Ways The Human Brain is Dooming the Economy, and In Appreciation of Mozzarella Sticks.