Vanity Fair has a good article on the making of Ghostbusters, and I recently read the oral history, and there are these Ghostbusters paper dolls, and I was like, is there some kind of Ghostbusters holiday coming up? Yes! The 30th anniversary is in August, so you can see it again in theatres, and I guess they’re planning to make Ghostbusters 3, and okay, I’m interested, but was Ghostbusters 2 any good? I don’t remember.

And what about The Box? Anyone remember that? I don’t because we’re talking about the early 90s and I didn’t have cable until… actually I still don’t have cable. Anyway, it was like this music-video-on-demand thing, a precursor to youtube and American Idol. You could call up some robot and pick which videos you wanted to see. I mention it because of this article about how technology led to the rise of Sir Mix-a-Lot—the Box let people watch that video as many times as they want, and they wanted to watch it a lot (hahah, it passes the Bechdel test!).

Which is great because without Baby Got Back, the world would lack these Latin translations (there is trouble for Mixalot who is earnestly demanding a part of that bubble) or this amazing video of movies singing the song or a ridiculous Gilbert & Sullivan version (they’re all about duty!) or the Christian Evangelical version or or or. I mean this goes on forever and thank goodness. This is why I love this newsletter. When I sat down to write it, I was not planning to go down the rabbit hole of Baby Got Back spoofs, and now here we are. Excellent.

There was a second knife attack related to Slender Man, and most of the commentary I’ve seen has been like “but girls! Why are girls doing this? Violence is for boys!!” Which is crap and always has been, and ignoring the angsty internal lives of adolescent girls can do real harm:

The intensity of bonds between young women have gone especially underexamined in recent years. For generations, it was accepted that adolescent girls might form highly emotional, deeply felt relationships with each other, kind of proto-marriages. For periods of American history, adolescent and teen schoolgirls regularly shared beds, openly expressed their adoration and devotion to each other and were sometimes said to be “smashed”—entwined in committed partnerships. But in the early-20th century, as heterosexual marriage came to be seen as a relationship based on emotion and mutual desire, female partnerships began to be seen as competitive and suspect. Young women were encouraged to train their attentions on young men; a dating culture emerged, and we have not spent nearly enough time since acknowledging the powerful influence that adolescent girls continue to have on each other.

In other ladynews, leaning in can be counterproductive and women who try to negotiate for salary are penalized far more than their male counterparts, and being an NHL ice girl is maybe not all it’s cracked up to be — it’s a lot like being an NFL cheerleader, in fact, where they have jiggle tests. Jiggle tests! All that jiggling is probably why writing playable ladies in the next Assassin’s Creed is just too hard, except actually the effort involved is pretty minimal. But you know there were totally ladies in other games so I guess everything is cool.

It’s not related to the Ubisoft mess, but I liked this post about female heroes in video games a lot:

Our lead characters have to be hard, and while we accept a male hero with a five o’clock shadow and a bad attitude generally unquestioned, a woman seems to need a reason to be hard. Something had to have been done to her.

Oh but anyway, that ice girls thing, if you read the comments on this other ice girls post (which you shouldn’t do!) it’s full of dudes who are like “but sex sells!” and guess what: it doesn’t! This primer on selling things without being evil is full of protips and pretty unbelievable examples of advertising, but the main point is that if you are still making sexist ads in 2014, it is because you’re sexist.

Otherwise, I’ve been…

• downloading Biophilia, a Bjork app that’s become the first app in MoMA’s digital collection. Here is a video about making it.
• talking to writers. Or treating car salesmen like writers: I always wanted to be a car salesmen. Maybe when I retire I’ll settle down and just work on selling that Buick I’ve had in my head for years.”
• visiting the penis museum. Well, okay, probably not, but I could, is the point. It’s in Iceland. Also there is a documentary called The Final Member. It is not good.
• sharing. Or not sharing. I don’t know, something, but I liked this article on the “sharing” economy.
• ignoring men, just like these ladies in 500 years of art history.

I don’t know about you, but I’m glad this week is nearly over. We can totally do this.