While You Were Offline: The Internet Freaks Over the Super Bowl’s Ads and Left Shark

Well, thanks Super Bowl. Because of you—and more specifically, the advertisements and musical performances surrounding the actual sports part of things—the Internet was filled to the brim with stuff to get upset about and have opinions on this week. Though we’d be remiss if we didn’t also point out you should be paying attention to Twitter’s CEO admitting the company “suck[s] at dealing with abuse” and whatever fallout comes from that, and reading Lindy West’s amazing piece about confronting a vocal troll. Really, those both might give you some hope for the future of humanity when it comes to the Internet … just in time for the following stories to potentially dash that hope against the harsh rocks of reality. Ah well. Here are some highlights from the last seven days on this crazy world wide web of ours.

Like a Well-Intentioned but Ultimately Problematic Marketing Campaign

What Happened: Procter & Gamble’s Always product line launched an advertising campaign intended to empower girls and young women faced with the message that doing something “like a girl” is a bad thing. Things didn’t necessarily go well.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Always had the best of intentions when it aired its “Like A Girl” spot during last weekend’s Super Bowl with the ad above. The spot, a shortened version of an advertisement from last year, was hailed as being groundbreaking by some, and the response on Twitter initially backed that up, with the #LikeAGirl hashtag on Twitter suddenly blowing up with women supporting the campaign. And then … well, the men got involved.

Almost as soon as #LikeAGirl trended on Twitter, #LikeABoy started getting used as a hashtag, with messages including such helpful critiques as “Why not #LikeABoy?” “Seriously #likeagirl is the most insulting commercial ever and there better be a #likeaboy commercial,” and “Bashed upon for stating my views, for hopefully one day us as men can have equality and treated the same #LikeABoy #Meninist.” (Dear those who might believe that’s actually a coherent argument: Please understand that for that to happen, men would have to be placed in a societal position of implied inferiority for centuries, so much so that the phrase “like a boy” would be used as a culturally-recognized insult that needed to be reclaimed, instead of a phase concocted by crybabies who misunderstood the original campaign intentionally to further their own agenda of fear-fuelled butt-hurt.)

That’s not to say that there weren’t legitimate concerns about the Like A Girl campaign, as some have pointed out. But really: turning a campaign about reducing the shame implicit in a gendered insult into an attempt to declare yourselves the more aggrieved party? That’s not just missing the point, that’s trolling everyone involved.

The Takeaway: We can but dream that one day we’ll live in a world where someone feels the need to make a “Like A Menanist” advertisement because that term has been recognized as signifying outrageously privileged loudmouths who don’t understand that it’s perfectly OK to sit back quietly and learn from others’ experiences and not just accept their own propaganda as definitive truth. Until then, let’s hope that the Always commercial and response to same starts a conversation that can get rid of the idea that doing anything “like a girl” is a bad thing.

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, You Guys

What Happened: Gawker Media tricked Coca-Cola into quoting the opening of Mein Kampf on social media as part of a prank to subvert the soda company’s attempt to lighten social media.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: As part of its Super Bowl promotional push, Coca-Cola launched something called #MakeItHappy, a campaign described by a company executive as “intended to disrupt the complacency that’s set in around online negativity.” The way it worked was simple: people who tweeted a message with the hashtag #MakeItHappy would get an automated response from the @CocaCola account that turned the text of that tweet into ASCII art of something cute, like a cartoon dog or maybe a balloon animal.

Of course, this kind of positivity could not stand. Enter Gawker Media, which created a special Twitter account called @MeinCoke to serialize the text of Mein Kampf on Twitter with the hashtag #MakeItHappy. Yes, the Mein Kampf written by Adolf Hitler. As you might expect, the bot behind the automated #MakeItHappy responses did what it was supposed to, and soon the @CocaCola account was posting Nazi propaganda.

Unsurprisingly, Coca-Cola quickly shut down the campaign after realizing what was happening, and released a statement in which it condemned Gawker. “Building a bot that attempts to spread hate through #MakeItHappy is a perfect example of the pervasive online negativity Coca-Cola wanted to address with this campaign,” the statement read.

The Takeaway: On the one hand, the very automated nature of #MakeItHappy—and the ultimately destructive nature of so much Internet discussion—meant that this kind of thing was almost destined to happen. On the other, man. That got dark super quickly.

Make Depressing Super Bowl Ads Happen

What Happened: Nationwide thought it was a great idea to have a Super Bowl ad that made everyone all too aware of their mortality. Apparently, no one agreed.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: For those who didn’t see the “Make Safe Happen” ad last weekend, it went a little something like this…



Oof. That’s a sucker punch of an ad, following 28 seconds of whimsy with … well, a genuinely impressive bait-and-switch of grimness. Those watching the game certainly didn’t appreciate it, with 63 percent of Twitter mentions immediately afterwards being negative, and an informal poll of ESPN reporter Darren Rovell’s Twitter following declaring it to be the worst ad of the Super Bowl:

RESULTS: Worst 1st half Super Bowl commercial vote was unanimous http://ift.tt/1K1lxhO

— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) February 2, 2015

Response to the ad was so negative that Nationwide actually released a statement on Sunday responding to the response, noting that “while some did not care for the ad, we hope it served to begin a dialogue to make safe happen for children everywhere.” (At least one father, who lost his daughter when she was four years old, disagreed.)

However, some people found a way to have fun with it. Admittedly, somewhat bleak, cynical fun, but you take what you can get, right?



The Takeaway: Given the amount of attention this ad has gotten for Nationwide, it’s possible that it could be considered a success by some marketing people. But please, please, please: Let’s not make this a trend to be followed up with bigger and “better” ads next year.

Left Shark

What Happened: Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime show was filled with everything America wanted: a few hits, the return of Missy Elliott, and a couple of dancing sharks.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: OK, so Missy’s return proved to be a mammoth success (downloads of Elliott’s music jumped an amazing 996 percent in the hours following, according to Neilsen Music), but the real star of Perry’s performance last Sunday ended up being the dancing sharks that backed her up during one part of the show. And, specifically, the one shark that seemed to not know the routine—although there are those who’d defend those moves as an artistic choice.

Within minutes of his appearance, Left Shark was trending on Twitter, turning into all manner of memes and being defended from those who took issue with his dance routine. Hell, he was even being declared the game’s MVP by sports fans.

That Left Shark is really dancer Bryan Gaw (as he confessed on Instagram) was unimportant. By the time Perry laid legal claim on the likeness of the shark, it was clear things had gotten way larger than any one person. This is Left Shark’s world now. Well, at least until next week when no one even remembers he exists anymore.

The Takeaway: Remember when it took an accidental nipple to get people this excited about halftime shows? Does this mean we’ve evolved as a species?

Photographs Are Destroying Art! Again! Or Something

What Happened: Is it plagiarism when you take a photograph standing next to someone else taking a photograph?

Where It Blew Up: Facebook, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: On the plus side, this one has nothing to do with the Super Bowl. Amateur photographer Sarah Scurr took a photograph of the San Rafael Glacier in the Northern Patagonian Ice Field while on a cruise in 2006; three years later, she entered the photograph into an online photography competition, little knowing that doing so would lead to her being accused of theft and copyright violation six years later.

And yet, that’s what happened. Scurr was accused on Facebook by another amateur photographer, Marisol Ortiz Elfeldt, who supplied her own photograph as “proof” that Scurr had stolen her image. The truth proved to be impressively mundane: It turned out that both women had apparently been on the same cruise, and snapped their respective pictures just seconds apart.

Elfeldt soon withdrew her complaint, but it was too late: critic Jonathan Jones had already taken the tiff and used it to build an argument that photography has become a “psuedo-art, with millions of people all taking pictures of the same things and all thinking we are special.” You might have thought we’d have dealt with such weirdly-archaic worries a long time ago, but apparently not.

The Takeaway: What should we take from this, exactly? The upside of seeing Elfeldt settle her dispute with Scurr so easily when faced with evidence that things weren’t as she feared, or the downside of Jones’ oddly outdated ludditism about photography, of all things? Think of it as a glass half-full, glass half-huh? situation about arguments we should have dealt with more than a century ago, perhaps.

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy: Why Any TV Show Is Better With Vampires

Kelly Link. Sharona Jacobs

Kelly Link likes zombies. A lot. Her Twitter handle is @haszombiesinit, and her 2006 short story collection Magic for Beginners contains not one but two zombie stories: “The Hortlak” and “Some Zombie Contingency Plans.” But despite this well-publicized love of zombies, Link’s new collection, Get in Trouble , focuses more on a different supernatural predator.

“I wanted to write some more zombie stories, but I just didn’t feel like I had any zombie stories in me at the moment,” Link says in Episode 136 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “But I was really interested in vampires this time around. So there are some vampire stories.”

Link is one of the most admired short story writers working today. Her unconventional narratives place oddball characters in everyday situations that are strangely altered by elements of fantasy and science fiction, creating quirky, dreamlike scenarios that are often deeply unsettling. Even when she tries her best to write something completely realistic, as in her new story “The Lesson,” elements of the fantastic creep in. The same thing happens when she watches television.

“I find that I get bored pretty easy watching television,” she says. “And I realized that if there is not a fantastic or a supernatural element to a story, that I become wistful, and I think, ‘This show would be so much better if one of the characters was a vampire.'”

She finds that pretty much any show—from sitcoms to cooking shows—can be improved by imagining that some or all of the characters are vampires. In fact, she’s made it into a party game to play with friends—watch your favorite TV show and see if you can spot any clues to suggest that some of the characters are secretly vampires.

“Usually there’s at least one,” she says. “And usually everybody can sort of agree that that’s probably the vampire.”

Listen to our complete interview with Kelly Link in Episode 136 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Kelly Link on the Monstrous Affections anthology:

“We started really thinking about how strange it was that vampires so often fall for teenage girls, and fall so hard that they’re willing to spend a lot of time in high schools or doing very teenage things, because frankly that sounds terrible to me. Maybe I would make a bad vampire, but my high school experience was not so amazing that I’d want to repeat it a lot. And so Cassie said that she always figured that if you were a vampire, that in fact the group you’d probably want to spend the most time with would be your peers, and how tragic that moment would be when you realize that your peer group—the group who shares a common body of experiences with you—is about to die out. And so she said she was thinking about writing a vampire story set in a nursing home, and that was such a touching, unusual take on the vampire story that we started thinking of other kinds of monster stories. That was really the impetus for that anthology.”

Kelly Link on her story “Valley of the Girls”:

“I started thinking about what it would be like, if things continue the way they are, if the rich keep getting richer and richer and richer, and the kinds of lifestyles their kids would have access to, and also the kind of safeguards that maybe families would put up around those kids to keep them out of the public eye—sort of an inversion of the celebrity culture. So in the story parents hire ‘Faces’ who enact the lives of their kids, so that if they’re being photographed or if they appear on social media, it is in fact these replacement children who have been hired to enact this perfect kid lifestyle. And at the same time maybe the kids would have super-expensive hobbies. … Sometimes the biggest markers of the way that people lived in the past are the really weird, extravagant gestures by people who had a lot of power and wanted to be remembered. And I felt there was a tension between adolescents who are hidden away from the world, but still wanted to make their mark. So maybe the person everybody sees as you isn’t you, but nevertheless you’re going to have a really big-ass pyramid, so that after you’re dead and gone people will still remember you.”

Kelly Link on genre boundaries:

“I think there is a sense in publishing that readers are much more open to stories that are not realistic, and it’s a shift which happens every once in a while. The kinds of realistic, mimetic fiction which were popular for so long, and the stuff which was considered ‘genre’—fantasy, horror, science fiction—those used to be much more intertwined than they were. There was a period when they were much more separate, and now it seems like things are moving back together again, which is great. … I really expected when I was first writing short stories that I would mostly be writing for an audience that was pretty well-versed in genre, and that loved specifically fantasy, science fiction, and horror. I read outside those genres, I read anything I can get my hands on, but I didn’t necessarily expect that the kinds of work that I did would find a larger audience. So it’s been kind of astonishing that these stories reach a larger audience, and god knows there’s a lot of other really great work which mostly reaches a genre readership that I think should reach a much, much wider readership.”

Kelly Link on superheroes:

“I did not start reading comics until I was in college—maybe my last year of high school—by which point I would say that half the time when I went into a comic book store, people in the aisles would say, ‘Excuse me, sir,’ as they went by, even though I had long hair and was wearing a skirt—I think because it did not seem like there were a lot of girls going to comic book stores, at least not in North Carolina. … [My approach] comes out of reading the comics that come out of that generation after Alan Moore and Frank Miller, where you did sort of think about, ‘Well, what about the people who got the powers that aren’t so amazing?’ In the two superhero stories I have, there are the people who go out and do the usual things, and yet I cannot quite commit to writing a story about people who go out there and save the world—in part because so many people have already told that story. So I can set that story on the sidelines of the story that I’m actually writing, but the thing I’m actually interested in is those weird liminal spaces in hotels, and people who make statues of superheroes out of butter. That’s the stuff that when I sit down to write, I think, ‘That would be really fun to put in a story.'”

How Snow Guns Keep the Slopes Coated in Fresh Powder

Bryan Christie Design

Between muddy trails and shorter seasons, global warming puts a chill on ski resorts. Typically the solution is one beloved by cold-themed supervillains everywhere: snow guns! Such blowers used to be expensive to run, but new versions, like Snow Logic’s DV4, expectorate winter wonderlands more efficiently. The upshot for one Vermont resort this season: $235,000 in projected savings, a 2.6 million-pound reduction in carbon emissions, and slopes full of happy, mogul-carving skiers.

BRYAN CHRISTIE DESIGN

1. Water Nozzle

Water blasts out through a cruciform nozzle; the perpendicular planes disrupt each other, breaking the stream into lots of tiny droplets. That increases the liquid surface area exposed to the air and speeds up freezing.

2. Nucleator

Snowflakes can form at higher temperatures if they grow from a seed—a piece of dust, a grain of silver iodide, or in this case, an ice crystal. Compressed air shoots ice particles from the nucleator into the water spray, where H2O molecules freeze around them.

3. Settings

Resorts adjust the amount of water to make various kinds of snow: wet, dense lower layers or the dry, fluffy topcoats that skiers love to slice through. Some guns automatically tweak their water settings to account for humidity that’s already in the air.

4. Pressurized Air

As the compressed gas escapes, the drop in pressure causes a local plunge in air temperature (like how the air whooshing from your bike tire feels cold). That means water can crystallize even when the ambient temp is several degrees above freezing.

5. Compression

It takes energy to pressurize air and pipe it up the hill. But Snow Logic’s model expels just 8 cubic feet per minute instead of (in older snowmakers) 300 to 500 cfm, thanks to optimized channels in the nozzles.

Watch SnowLogic’s blowers in action.

While You Were Offline: The Internet Freaks Over the Super Bowl’s Ads and Left Shark

Well, thanks Super Bowl. Because of you—and more specifically, the advertisements and musical performances surrounding the actual sports part of things—the Internet was filled to the brim with stuff to get upset about and have opinions on this week. Though we’d be remiss if we didn’t also point out you should be paying attention to Twitter’s CEO admitting the company “suck[s] at dealing with abuse” and whatever fallout comes from that, and reading Lindy West’s amazing piece about confronting a vocal troll. Really, those both might give you some hope for the future of humanity when it comes to the Internet … just in time for the following stories to potentially dash that hope against the harsh rocks of reality. Ah well. Here are some highlights from the last seven days on this crazy world wide web of ours.

Like a Well-Intentioned but Ultimately Problematic Marketing Campaign

What Happened: Procter & Gamble’s Always product line launched an advertising campaign intended to empower girls and young women faced with the message that doing something “like a girl” is a bad thing. Things didn’t necessarily go well.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Always had the best of intentions when it aired its “Like A Girl” spot during last weekend’s Super Bowl with the ad above. The spot, a shortened version of an advertisement from last year, was hailed as being groundbreaking by some, and the response on Twitter initially backed that up, with the #LikeAGirl hashtag on Twitter suddenly blowing up with women supporting the campaign. And then … well, the men got involved.

Almost as soon as #LikeAGirl trended on Twitter, #LikeABoy started getting used as a hashtag, with messages including such helpful critiques as “Why not #LikeABoy?” “Seriously #likeagirl is the most insulting commercial ever and there better be a #likeaboy commercial,” and “Bashed upon for stating my views, for hopefully one day us as men can have equality and treated the same #LikeABoy #Meninist.” (Dear those who might believe that’s actually a coherent argument: Please understand that for that to happen, men would have to be placed in a societal position of implied inferiority for centuries, so much so that the phrase “like a boy” would be used as a culturally-recognized insult that needed to be reclaimed, instead of a phase concocted by crybabies who misunderstood the original campaign intentionally to further their own agenda of fear-fuelled butt-hurt.)

That’s not to say that there weren’t legitimate concerns about the Like A Girl campaign, as some have pointed out. But really: turning a campaign about reducing the shame implicit in a gendered insult into an attempt to declare yourselves the more aggrieved party? That’s not just missing the point, that’s trolling everyone involved.

The Takeaway: We can but dream that one day we’ll live in a world where someone feels the need to make a “Like A Menanist” advertisement because that term has been recognized as signifying outrageously privileged loudmouths who don’t understand that it’s perfectly OK to sit back quietly and learn from others’ experiences and not just accept their own propaganda as definitive truth. Until then, let’s hope that the Always commercial and response to same starts a conversation that can get rid of the idea that doing anything “like a girl” is a bad thing.

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, You Guys

What Happened: Gawker Media tricked Coca-Cola into quoting the opening of Mein Kampf on social media as part of a prank to subvert the soda company’s attempt to lighten social media.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: As part of its Super Bowl promotional push, Coca-Cola launched something called #MakeItHappy, a campaign described by a company executive as “intended to disrupt the complacency that’s set in around online negativity.” The way it worked was simple: people who tweeted a message with the hashtag #MakeItHappy would get an automated response from the @CocaCola account that turned the text of that tweet into ASCII art of something cute, like a cartoon dog or maybe a balloon animal.

Of course, this kind of positivity could not stand. Enter Gawker Media, which created a special Twitter account called @MeinCoke to serialize the text of Mein Kampf on Twitter with the hashtag #MakeItHappy. Yes, the Mein Kampf written by Adolf Hitler. As you might expect, the bot behind the automated #MakeItHappy responses did what it was supposed to, and soon the @CocaCola account was posting Nazi propaganda.

Unsurprisingly, Coca-Cola quickly shut down the campaign after realizing what was happening, and released a statement in which it condemned Gawker. “Building a bot that attempts to spread hate through #MakeItHappy is a perfect example of the pervasive online negativity Coca-Cola wanted to address with this campaign,” the statement read.

The Takeaway: On the one hand, the very automated nature of #MakeItHappy—and the ultimately destructive nature of so much Internet discussion—meant that this kind of thing was almost destined to happen. On the other, man. That got dark super quickly.

Make Depressing Super Bowl Ads Happen

What Happened: Nationwide thought it was a great idea to have a Super Bowl ad that made everyone all too aware of their mortality. Apparently, no one agreed.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: For those who didn’t see the “Make Safe Happen” ad last weekend, it went a little something like this…



Oof. That’s a sucker punch of an ad, following 28 seconds of whimsy with … well, a genuinely impressive bait-and-switch of grimness. Those watching the game certainly didn’t appreciate it, with 63 percent of Twitter mentions immediately afterwards being negative, and an informal poll of ESPN reporter Darren Rovell’s Twitter following declaring it to be the worst ad of the Super Bowl:

RESULTS: Worst 1st half Super Bowl commercial vote was unanimous http://ift.tt/1K1lxhO

— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) February 2, 2015

Response to the ad was so negative that Nationwide actually released a statement on Sunday responding to the response, noting that “while some did not care for the ad, we hope it served to begin a dialogue to make safe happen for children everywhere.” (At least one father, who lost his daughter when she was four years old, disagreed.)

However, some people found a way to have fun with it. Admittedly, somewhat bleak, cynical fun, but you take what you can get, right?



The Takeaway: Given the amount of attention this ad has gotten for Nationwide, it’s possible that it could be considered a success by some marketing people. But please, please, please: Let’s not make this a trend to be followed up with bigger and “better” ads next year.

Left Shark

What Happened: Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime show was filled with everything America wanted: a few hits, the return of Missy Elliott, and a couple of dancing sharks.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: OK, so Missy’s return proved to be a mammoth success (downloads of Elliott’s music jumped an amazing 996 percent in the hours following, according to Neilsen Music), but the real star of Perry’s performance last Sunday ended up being the dancing sharks that backed her up during one part of the show. And, specifically, the one shark that seemed to not know the routine—although there are those who’d defend those moves as an artistic choice.

Within minutes of his appearance, Left Shark was trending on Twitter, turning into all manner of memes and being defended from those who took issue with his dance routine. Hell, he was even being declared the game’s MVP by sports fans.

That Left Shark is really dancer Bryan Gaw (as he confessed on Instagram) was unimportant. By the time Perry laid legal claim on the likeness of the shark, it was clear things had gotten way larger than any one person. This is Left Shark’s world now. Well, at least until next week when no one even remembers he exists anymore.

The Takeaway: Remember when it took an accidental nipple to get people this excited about halftime shows? Does this mean we’ve evolved as a species?

Photographs Are Destroying Art! Again! Or Something

What Happened: Is it plagiarism when you take a photograph standing next to someone else taking a photograph?

Where It Blew Up: Facebook, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: On the plus side, this one has nothing to do with the Super Bowl. Amateur photographer Sarah Scurr took a photograph of the San Rafael Glacier in the Northern Patagonian Ice Field while on a cruise in 2006; three years later, she entered the photograph into an online photography competition, little knowing that doing so would lead to her being accused of theft and copyright violation six years later.

And yet, that’s what happened. Scurr was accused on Facebook by another amateur photographer, Marisol Ortiz Elfeldt, who supplied her own photograph as “proof” that Scurr had stolen her image. The truth proved to be impressively mundane: It turned out that both women had apparently been on the same cruise, and snapped their respective pictures just seconds apart.

Elfeldt soon withdrew her complaint, but it was too late: critic Jonathan Jones had already taken the tiff and used it to build an argument that photography has become a “psuedo-art, with millions of people all taking pictures of the same things and all thinking we are special.” You might have thought we’d have dealt with such weirdly-archaic worries a long time ago, but apparently not.

The Takeaway: What should we take from this, exactly? The upside of seeing Elfeldt settle her dispute with Scurr so easily when faced with evidence that things weren’t as she feared, or the downside of Jones’ oddly outdated ludditism about photography, of all things? Think of it as a glass half-full, glass half-huh? situation about arguments we should have dealt with more than a century ago, perhaps.

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy: Why Any TV Show Is Better With Vampires

Kelly Link. Sharona Jacobs

Kelly Link likes zombies. A lot. Her Twitter handle is @haszombiesinit, and her 2006 short story collection Magic for Beginners contains not one but two zombie stories: “The Hortlak” and “Some Zombie Contingency Plans.” But despite this well-publicized love of zombies, Link’s new collection, Get in Trouble , focuses more on a different supernatural predator.

“I wanted to write some more zombie stories, but I just didn’t feel like I had any zombie stories in me at the moment,” Link says in Episode 136 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “But I was really interested in vampires this time around. So there are some vampire stories.”

Link is one of the most admired short story writers working today. Her unconventional narratives place oddball characters in everyday situations that are strangely altered by elements of fantasy and science fiction, creating quirky, dreamlike scenarios that are often deeply unsettling. Even when she tries her best to write something completely realistic, as in her new story “The Lesson,” elements of the fantastic creep in. The same thing happens when she watches television.

“I find that I get bored pretty easy watching television,” she says. “And I realized that if there is not a fantastic or a supernatural element to a story, that I become wistful, and I think, ‘This show would be so much better if one of the characters was a vampire.'”

She finds that pretty much any show—from sitcoms to cooking shows—can be improved by imagining that some or all of the characters are vampires. In fact, she’s made it into a party game to play with friends—watch your favorite TV show and see if you can spot any clues to suggest that some of the characters are secretly vampires.

“Usually there’s at least one,” she says. “And usually everybody can sort of agree that that’s probably the vampire.”

Listen to our complete interview with Kelly Link in Episode 136 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Kelly Link on the Monstrous Affections anthology:

“We started really thinking about how strange it was that vampires so often fall for teenage girls, and fall so hard that they’re willing to spend a lot of time in high schools or doing very teenage things, because frankly that sounds terrible to me. Maybe I would make a bad vampire, but my high school experience was not so amazing that I’d want to repeat it a lot. And so Cassie said that she always figured that if you were a vampire, that in fact the group you’d probably want to spend the most time with would be your peers, and how tragic that moment would be when you realize that your peer group—the group who shares a common body of experiences with you—is about to die out. And so she said she was thinking about writing a vampire story set in a nursing home, and that was such a touching, unusual take on the vampire story that we started thinking of other kinds of monster stories. That was really the impetus for that anthology.”

Kelly Link on her story “Valley of the Girls”:

“I started thinking about what it would be like, if things continue the way they are, if the rich keep getting richer and richer and richer, and the kinds of lifestyles their kids would have access to, and also the kind of safeguards that maybe families would put up around those kids to keep them out of the public eye—sort of an inversion of the celebrity culture. So in the story parents hire ‘Faces’ who enact the lives of their kids, so that if they’re being photographed or if they appear on social media, it is in fact these replacement children who have been hired to enact this perfect kid lifestyle. And at the same time maybe the kids would have super-expensive hobbies. … Sometimes the biggest markers of the way that people lived in the past are the really weird, extravagant gestures by people who had a lot of power and wanted to be remembered. And I felt there was a tension between adolescents who are hidden away from the world, but still wanted to make their mark. So maybe the person everybody sees as you isn’t you, but nevertheless you’re going to have a really big-ass pyramid, so that after you’re dead and gone people will still remember you.”

Kelly Link on genre boundaries:

“I think there is a sense in publishing that readers are much more open to stories that are not realistic, and it’s a shift which happens every once in a while. The kinds of realistic, mimetic fiction which were popular for so long, and the stuff which was considered ‘genre’—fantasy, horror, science fiction—those used to be much more intertwined than they were. There was a period when they were much more separate, and now it seems like things are moving back together again, which is great. … I really expected when I was first writing short stories that I would mostly be writing for an audience that was pretty well-versed in genre, and that loved specifically fantasy, science fiction, and horror. I read outside those genres, I read anything I can get my hands on, but I didn’t necessarily expect that the kinds of work that I did would find a larger audience. So it’s been kind of astonishing that these stories reach a larger audience, and god knows there’s a lot of other really great work which mostly reaches a genre readership that I think should reach a much, much wider readership.”

Kelly Link on superheroes:

“I did not start reading comics until I was in college—maybe my last year of high school—by which point I would say that half the time when I went into a comic book store, people in the aisles would say, ‘Excuse me, sir,’ as they went by, even though I had long hair and was wearing a skirt—I think because it did not seem like there were a lot of girls going to comic book stores, at least not in North Carolina. … [My approach] comes out of reading the comics that come out of that generation after Alan Moore and Frank Miller, where you did sort of think about, ‘Well, what about the people who got the powers that aren’t so amazing?’ In the two superhero stories I have, there are the people who go out and do the usual things, and yet I cannot quite commit to writing a story about people who go out there and save the world—in part because so many people have already told that story. So I can set that story on the sidelines of the story that I’m actually writing, but the thing I’m actually interested in is those weird liminal spaces in hotels, and people who make statues of superheroes out of butter. That’s the stuff that when I sit down to write, I think, ‘That would be really fun to put in a story.'”

How Snow Guns Keep the Slopes Coated in Fresh Powder

Bryan Christie Design

Between muddy trails and shorter seasons, global warming puts a chill on ski resorts. Typically the solution is one beloved by cold-themed supervillains everywhere: snow guns! Such blowers used to be expensive to run, but new versions, like Snow Logic’s DV4, expectorate winter wonderlands more efficiently. The upshot for one Vermont resort this season: $235,000 in projected savings, a 2.6 million-pound reduction in carbon emissions, and slopes full of happy, mogul-carving skiers.

BRYAN CHRISTIE DESIGN

1. Water Nozzle

Water blasts out through a cruciform nozzle; the perpendicular planes disrupt each other, breaking the stream into lots of tiny droplets. That increases the liquid surface area exposed to the air and speeds up freezing.

2. Nucleator

Snowflakes can form at higher temperatures if they grow from a seed—a piece of dust, a grain of silver iodide, or in this case, an ice crystal. Compressed air shoots ice particles from the nucleator into the water spray, where H2O molecules freeze around them.

3. Settings

Resorts adjust the amount of water to make various kinds of snow: wet, dense lower layers or the dry, fluffy topcoats that skiers love to slice through. Some guns automatically tweak their water settings to account for humidity that’s already in the air.

4. Pressurized Air

As the compressed gas escapes, the drop in pressure causes a local plunge in air temperature (like how the air whooshing from your bike tire feels cold). That means water can crystallize even when the ambient temp is several degrees above freezing.

5. Compression

It takes energy to pressurize air and pipe it up the hill. But Snow Logic’s model expels just 8 cubic feet per minute instead of (in older snowmakers) 300 to 500 cfm, thanks to optimized channels in the nozzles.

Watch SnowLogic’s blowers in action.