Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Frances Bean Cobain Does Not Think Highly of Twilight

Courtney Love told Howard Stern yesterday that her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was offered Kristen Stewart’s Bella role in the Twilight movies at age thirteen. “That’s a true story,” she said. “Someone just saw a picture of her in a magazine and sent me the script.” Love says Cobain immediately rejected the script, saying, “That’s a sexist, Mormon, piece of shit.”

And that's a suspiciously mature opinion for a thirteen-year-old. But if your logorrheic mom is going to quote you to Howard Stern either way (and even though you haven't seen each other in three years), what better made-up quote could you ask for? Courtney Love: Not even close to the world's most embarrassing mom. 


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Stop Telling Us We're Wearing the Wrong Size Bra

Jockey has announced a bold move in the sphere of brassieres: For their new Volumetric Fit System line, the underwear maker will ditch the A-B-C-D cup system and restore accuracy in band sizes. Instead of measuring around "the fullest part of your breasts" to determine cup size, a shopper will pour her breasts into measuring cup-like devices to determine breast volume. Band sizes will correspond with the actual measurement, in inches, of the band. (Traditional band sizes are approximately the length of the band in inches, plus four.) So instead of 34B, for instance, you might be 2-30. Jockey explains their new system here.

I am of two minds about the Volumetric Fit System. On one hand, restoring band size accuracy is a step toward honesty in bra sizes. I've always been jealous of menswear practices that allow a man to simply put a measuring tape around his neck and call it a day. If womens' clothing were that straightforward, we wouldn't waste so much time in dressing rooms.

On the other hand, Jockey's press campaign comes packaged with that irritating statistic that appears at least once in every issue of every womens' magazine: "85 percent of women are wearing the wrong bra size." Shut up about what I'm doing wrong with my underwear, already.

I have been a peddler of bra size anxiety. In my late teens, I spent summers and holidays working in the bra department of now-defunct midwestern department store Marshall Field's. I would march around with a pale pink measuring tape draped around my neck, shouting chipper Hellos! at strangers and offering to measure their breasts. I learned to size bras in approximately 30 seconds during a "training session" with a sales rep from Wacoal. You measure two places on a woman's body, then you add a number to one number to get the band size, and subtract one number from the other to get the cup. It's a system that encourages shopping — just hard enough to confuse a woman brandishing a measuring tape for the first time in her bedroom, but simple enough for a teen sales girl to learn between smoking breaks. (If you want to learn how to size bras, go here.)

The system was not invented to confuse. (The disparity between a band's inch measurement and its numerical size is a vestige from garment-construction practices. The size corresponds with the inch measurement of the area above your breasts, like so.) But its opacity aids sales nonetheless. Victoria's Secret hosts regular bra sizing events to get shoppers into their stores. Women describe their new bras as revelations. "It can change your life," Jezebel exclaims. Getting a new bra size "literally performs miracles. It can reverse aging. It can make you look ten, even twenty pounds lighter," Oprah says. We are told that the moment a sales girl instructs us to discard every single bra we already own to purchase all news ones is, in fact, liberation.

Yes, a bra that fits is better than one that does not. Yes, a good bra can make elements of your life more pleasant. Yes, some women have great difficulty finding bras that fit, and when they do find them, it makes them really happy. Good for them.

But can we stop obsessing about bra fit now? The source of those bandied-about statistics about wrong bra sizes are, after all, marketing research firms financed by the same companies that once paid for me to wear a measuring tape around my neck in the bra department of Marshall Field's. (This week's "85 percent" figure comes from Jockey's Volumetric Fit press release. Its source is a study from corporate consulting firm Griffin Strategic Partners entitled "Consumer Validation of New Bra Concept.") In reality, however, there is only one universal truth when it comes to fit, and it equally applies to bras, shoes, pants, socks, and wedding bands: If you put it on and like how it looks and feels, then it fits just fine. Your bra is not wrong. Your bra cannot be wrong. Your bra is underwear, a value-neutral object to be worn, replaced, stuffed, discarded, celebrated, hidden, or exposed however you want.


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Samsung Galaxy S 4 Active shown off with AT&T branding

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Samsung Galaxy S 4 Active shown off with AT&T branding

The Samsung Galaxy S 4 Active isn't really much of a secret at this point, despite the fact that it's still unannounced. It's already been seen in its share of images and videos, and the I537 -- the AT&T-branded version -- has even been spotted passing through the FCC. Fortunately, @evleaks dug up some imagery of this particular variant of the rugged smartphone in black (though it will supposedly be offered in teal as well), complete with the trademark AT&T globe on the back. It's rumored to offer a 1.9GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600 chipset, HD display, 8-megapixel rear camera and water-resistant protection. What's more, we're being told that this is just one of many Samsung devices on its way to the large GSM operator this year, accompanying the Galaxy S4 Mini, Galaxy S3 Mini (oddly), Galaxy Mega 6.3 and Galaxy Note 3. Pricing is still unknown, but we have to wonder if the date on the phone's display above is an indication of what we can expect to see at Samsung's June 20th event.

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Intel sets Haswell launch for June 4th, details bold battery life claims

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Intel sets Haswell launch for June 4th, backs up claims about allday battery life

Haswell is hardly a secret at this point: there's been a steady drip-drip of of demos and technical leaks since as far back as 2011, and just a month ago we brought you the low-down on its integrated graphics. But today, finally, we have official pricing for a number of variants, a concrete date for availability (this coming Tuesday, June 4th) and, perhaps most importantly, some detailed benchmark claims about what Haswell is capable of -- particularly in its mobile form.

Sure, Intel already dominates in MacBooks, Ultrabooks (by definition) and in hybrids like Surface Pro, but the chip maker readily admits that the processors in those portable PCs were just cut-down desktop chips. Haswell is different, having been built from the ground up with Intel's North Cape prototype and other mobile form factors in mind. As a loose-lipped executive recently let slip, we can look forward to a 50 percent increase in battery life in the coming wave of devices, with no loss of performance. Read on and we'll discover how this is possible and what it could mean for the dream of all-day mobile computing.Haswell mobile slide deck See all photos 22 Photos

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Mobile HaswellIntel sets Haswell launch for June 4th, backs up claims about allday battery life

Although Intel has previously claimed a 10 hour battery life for North Cape, that figure isn't actually promoted in today's slide deck. Instead, we're told Haswell will provide up to 9.1 hours of HD video playback on an Ultrabook-class Core i7. Video playback isn't particularly processor intensive, but nonetheless this benchmark bodes well compared to what an Ivy Bridge machine can manage, and indeed it's said to be the "biggest battery life increase in Intel history."

The above slide also hints at how this sort of gain is achieved: largely through a drop in power from 20W in Ivy Bridge (17W for the processor plus 3W for the chipset) down to 15W in Haswell (which now incorporates both components). Of course, these wattages are just upper limits, and the chip has plenty of scope to scale down further during easier tasks. A Haswell-based Ultrabook actually draws less than 6W during video playback, or two thirds that of an Ivy Bridge system. It also supports an ultra low-power standby state that can hold fresh data for up to 13 days, which is three times as long as Ivy Bridge, and it can wake from sleep mode in three seconds instead of seven.

All of this should come alongside a 40 percent increase in graphics performance in Ultrabook-class machines with HD 5000 GPUs, which ought to make Tomb Raider playable at 1,366 x 768 and medium settings, and BioShock Infinite almost playable with a frame rate of 27fps. On the other hand, fatter Haswell laptops with higher wattages (above 28W) and Iris-branded GPUs should see more of an improvement over the last generation, of up to 2x.

Desktop HaswellIntel sets Haswell launch for June 4th, backs up claims about allday battery life

You can blame us for neglecting the desktop components up until now, but hey -- Intel started it. You have to scroll some way through the presentation before you get to concrete desktop info, so we've split off those slides into the gallery below.Haswell desktop slide deck See all photos 7 Photos

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In terms of gaming, both Tomb Raider and BioShock Infinite should now be playable at 1080p and medium settings without recourse to a discrete graphics card, thanks in part to the use of embedded DRAM to reduce latency in communication between the CPU and GPU. Further gains should be possible from enhanced overclocking on K-branded products, and in particular the ability to increase base clock tuning ratios.

Finally, we also have pricing for the quad-core desktop parts that are set to become available to end users this coming Tuesday. These will start at $192 for the lowest-spec Core i5-4570 and go up to $242 for an unlocked Core i5-4670K and $339 for the Core i7-4770K. Pricing and various other details for dual-core SKUs will follow soon, but we've already reviewed our first quad-core Haswell gaming laptop -- MSI's GT70 Dragon Edition -- with some pretty encouraging results.

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DirecTV reportedly one of three $1 billion-plus bidders for Hulu

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DirecTV reportedly bidding $1 billion for Hulu

And then there were three. Bloomberg is reporting that a trio of companies are hoping to fork out over one billion dollars for the privilege of taking online video service Hulu under their wing, and DirecTV is one of them. While we're not quite sure which other companies are involved in the process, we've been told that Yahoo, Time Warner Cable and a few others have at least thrown out offers, with no confirmation on how much they were willing to spend. Although those "people with knowledge of the bid" could include a few hoping to encourage more $1b+ offers, those extra large checks increase the odds Hulu will actually sell this time. We're quietly hoping that this potential bidding war will be resolved through an arm wrestling match, though DirecTV's legal team likely wouldn't approve.

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Pretty False Lashes for Sensitive Eyes

Yesterday, in the latest installment of our GIF beauty tutorial series, makeup artist Daniel Martin used Winks by Georgie individual lashes. In the world of faux lashes, there are hundreds of options. Many look aggressively costume-y, or so retro we wonder if much has changed since their 1950's post-war popularity (modernized plastic versions contributed to an uptick in popularity). However, with Winks, we were instantly enamored of the brand's sweet paper boxes, decorated with colorful fluttering fans, and the wearable options available. Eyelash shelves, these are not.

Sisters Megan Allen and Abbey Watt are the founders of three-year-old Winks by Georgie. "We grew up in Georgia, which is where 'Georgie' comes from," explains Allen, who's managed to hold onto her lilting southern drawl despite spending some time in New York as a former fashion and beauty publicist (she now resides in L.A.). "MAC is known for their lash styles, but all those brands [like MAC] have big, kind of crazy ones, and we wanted to create something that's more natural-looking and classic." Out of their ten handcrafted, human hair lash designs (except for Nos. 5 and 7, which are synthetic), their most popular sets include the L'Avant Gardiste, which is a strip with fuller outer edges (Watt's staples) and the Bon Ton (meant to only amplify the outer lashes). "Those are my everyday ones right now," she says of the Bon Tons, which were modeled after the sixties version once known as "demis." "I'll even pop them on at a red light, they're that easy to apply."

A must for this collection included a safe glue option. "A lot of the companies that were making [lash] adhesives were the same ones that make Super Glue," Allen says of the revelation they discovered during their extensive research process. Winks by Georgie's version uses a natural latex ingredient instead of harsh chemicals like formaldehyde (which exists in other mainstream formulas). It's dermatologist- and opthamologist-tested and approved, as well as vegan and PETA-certified.

Our favorite part of the collection, however, is the convenient reusable compact that is included with their classic lash sets (La Starlette, L'Avant Gardiste and La Chérie) and otherwise sold separately. "Women don't know that lashes are reusable as long as you don't put mascara or liner on them," explains Allen. "But if you use a tweezer to remove the leftover adhesive, ours can be safely stored and re-worn up to five or six times."

Winks by Georgie, starting from $8 at Nordstrom


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