By Kat Bein

Miami’s witchiest hour got a lot prettier when A$AP Rocky rushed the Mind Melt main stage at III Points over the weekend. The three-night music festival saw headline performances from Erykah Badu, SZA, and Rocky’s musical bestie Tyler, the Creator, who appeared onstage with A$AP Sunday night (February 17) to scream through energetic renditions of “Potato Salad” and “Who Dat Boy.”

Rocky’s set may have been the wildest moment of the weekend. “Distorted Records,” “Praise The Lord (Da Shine),” and more tracks from his latest album, Testing, brawled through the speakers, but it was the second half of the show, with absolute bangers from “Wild For The Night” to A$AP Ferg’s “Plain Jane,” that incited the most gruesome mosh pits.

The New York City rapper is truly a madman with a high-art addiction. MTV News caught up with the high-fashion rapper and “Babushka” enthusiast backstage before his set to hear about Testing and his favorite new fashion accessory, as well as whether or not that WANGSAP collaboration is still a thing.

MTV News: Welcome to Miami. You’ve been here awhile, right? You arrived Friday to play with Tyler, the Creator.

A$AP Rocky: Yeah, that’s a while for me, man, because, Miami is the fast life. Technically I spent about – I don’t know how many dog years. I spent about two Flacko years here.

MTV News: Tell me about your history with Florida. You have Kodak Black on your last album, Testing.

A$AP Rocky: Yeah man, shout out to Kodak. I always wanted to work with him, but aside from that, I wanted to put him on a song that people weren’t used to hearing him on, like, the textures. I don’t make songs. I don’t make clothes. I don’t make music. I make textures. Everything is a texture and a feeling, right? I mean it’s equivalent to it at least, and opposed to having him rapping and trying to go for a No. 1 hit, I had him crying on the phone, explaining his plight, his devastation while on the jail phone.

MTV News: Yeah. It’s really intense.

A$AP Rocky: It’s just him explaining and expressing how his child was taken away from him, and how he was stripped of his dignity and freedom. People, they just want to hear me talk about how I’ve got 100 bitches. How I fucked 100 dude’s bitches all day. That being said, Florida harvests a lot of great artists. You’ve got to pick and choose who you want to represent you, or who can help complement your body of work.

MTV News: I want to hear the story about you using “Porcelain,” the Moby sample. That album was huge for me when it came out, and that’s not a pop-off song.

A$AP Rocky: We reached out to Moby, and once we finally got the OK from him, he re-sang the vocals. We replayed the instruments. He’s also in the end of the “A$AP Forever” video. I feel like his cameo being so short, it was that artistic value like we’ve been talking about — [as] opposed to just, let my nuts hang and saying, “Oh look, I got Moby in the video.” Just like how people don’t know Lauryn Hill played a big part in the last track on that album with Frank Ocean. It’s not just getting it cleared. It’s people re-singing stuff and all that. It’s appreciated. Shout out Dean Blunt. Shout out Hector Delgado, man. Shout outs Frank Ocean and shout out Miss Lauryn Hill.

MTV News: That’s interesting. I was talking with my boyfriend the other day about how Dr. Dre will create beats out of samples and then get musicians to replay those samples.

A$AP Rocky: I think it just brings some type of depth to it. It’s already deep, but when you really think about how much effort – it took a lot just to make these tracks. You could easily just sing or rap on a two-track or instrumental and call it a song.

MTV News: When people put their human element into whatever it is, whether listeners realize they’re registering it or not, that energy is there.

A$AP Rocky: What you get is what you manifest. What you manifest is what you get.

MTV News: What are you manifesting right now? What’s up with the “Babushka” track? I saw a kid out in the crowd, all day he’s been wearing it. People are shouting it out.

A$AP Rocky: I want to encourage more people to wear babushkas. Babushka boy.

MTV News: What inspired it in your own life?

A$AP Rocky: When I got this scar right here. I was skateboarding. I was on the half pipe. Just so you know, I’ve got a new story for everyone who I tell about this scar.

MTV News: So it’s shrouded in mystery, and now a babushka.

A$AP Rocky: But the babushka came because I didn’t want to reveal the scar yet.

MTV News: What’s going on with your collaborative project with Tyler? Is that still in the works?

A$AP Rocky: Nah man, I was bullshitting. Fuck Tyler [laughs].

MTV News: You did show up to his set on Friday though.

A$AP Rocky: Yeah, we did “Telephone Calls.”

MTV News: Is there anything else you want to say or mention?

A$AP Rocky: Shout outs MTV. I used to be part of the staff over there, so shout outs to my ex-comrades and ex co-workers. Hope everybody’s well over there. Shout out the world, shout out to music lovers and music makers across the board. I just hope I stay pretty forever and my spirit stays beautiful.

MTV News: Inside –

A$AP Rocky: And out!

More Audi drivers can experience that rush from hitting a stretch of green traffic lights in a row. 

The car maker previously showed off its Traffic Light Information system about two years ago to give drivers more information about red lights and how long they’d be waiting. But this week Audi is all about green light information. 

With what Audi is calling Green Light Optimized Speed Advisory (GLOSA), drivers are connected to city infrastructure and can “game” the system by going a recommended speed limit. The dash indicates the best speed to catch the “green wave” based on the car’s position, speed limits in the area, and signal timing. It’s not that far off from the premise of timed streetlights to encourage driving the speed limit, but it’s a helpful boost.

Here’s a car catching the lights:

Audi’s connected system, offered through its Connect Prime membership on certain 2017, 2018, and other new models cars, also expanded this week to five more cities including Denver; White Plains, New York; Gainesville, Florida; Orlando; and Northern Virginia. 

SEE ALSO: Audi’s new cars will tell you how long you’ll be stuck at that red light

These areas expand Audi’s Vehicle-to-Infrastructure connectivity, or V2I, to 13 cities at more than 4,700 intersections using 4G LTE data in the vehicle to communicate with real-time info from cities’ traffic management systems. Before the green light recommendation, the car would tell you how long you’d be at a red light. That’s helpful info to reduce the anxiety waiting for what feels like an interminable stop, but now you can avoid the wait altogether.

Already drivers in Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., have been connected to the traffic light info. Now more cities are getting the green light.

In 1975, geologist Wallace Broecker penned a scientific paper warning about the still little-discussed concept of “global warming.” Forty-four years later Broecker has died at 87, but not before proving himself a legendary earth scientist, repeatedly underscoring that amassing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has stoked relentless climate change.

Ancient air found in ice cores proves, indisputably, that Earth’s carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations are the highest they’ve been in at least 800,000 years — though other measures show that CO2 concentrations are now likely the highest they’ve been in 15 million years. The planet is responding: 18 of the last 19 years have been the warmest on record. 

Broecker publicly warned about climate change in a 1975 report published in the academic journal Science entitled “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” 

“Of the climatic effects induced by man, only that for CO2 can be conclusively demonstrated to be globally significant,” Broecker wrote.

Broecker’s analysis turned out to be largely accurate. 

He warned that Earth would soon experience an accelerated warming trend. “It is possible that we are on the brink of a several-decades-long period of rapid warming,” Broecker wrote. And over the last 40 years, Earth has indeed experienced a rapid warming trend that has been closely watched and confirmed by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and outside agencies and organizations. 

“The trends are due almost entirely to us (and specifically the fossil-fuel related increases in CO2),” Gavin Schmidt, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Mashable. 

What’s more, in the mid-1970s, Broecker predicted that carbon dioxide would become an increasingly dominant influence. He anticipated that naturally-running climate cycles — which scientists would later pinpoint as decades-long major cooling trends in the Pacific Ocean — had subdued global average temperatures in the late 1940s through the 1970s but would soon end. (This period has been incorrectly labeled as evidence of long-term “global cooling”). This meant that historically-high carbon dioxide levels would soon show their amassing strength, as the temporary cooling run “bottomed out.” 

“Once this happens, the CO2 effect will tend to become a significant factor and by the first decade of the next century we may experience global temperatures warmer than any in the last 1000 years,” Broecker wrote.

“We’re playing with an angry beast — a climate system that has been shown to be very sensitive,” Broecker later told the Associated Press, in 1997.

SEE ALSO: Trump fails to block NASA’s carbon sleuth from going to space

Now in the second decade of the 21st century, humanity has likely experienced the highest temperatures on Earth since around 120,000 years ago — back when hippos roamed Europe. 

“This period is now the warmest in the history of modern civilization,” federal scientists concluded in the congressionally-mandated Fourth National Climate Assessment.

Today, scientists know that about half of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by humans is absorbed by the oceans, forests, and vegetation. That’s a good thing. But the looming problem is that these natural “sinks” of carbon are maxed out. The planet can’t keep up with amassing carbon emissions, which might not even peak for another decade. 

Critically, Broecker noted that Earth’s rising temperatures are expected to continue rising, though this rise may slow down or speed up as other natural climate cycles kick in. But these temporary events can’t halt a relentless warming trend. 

“Future natural cycles would merely modulate this ever-steepening rise,” Broecker wrote. 

In the end, Broecker was  right about the ensuing decades — and beyond of warming, years before reliable Earth-monitoring satellites were launched into space.

“We may be in for a climatic surprise,” he said.

On Twitter, a place where a lot of bad things happen, there’s a mostly harmless but decidedly annoying phenomenon. A lot of people, mostly women, have noticed that one or two men always, no matter what, reply to their tweets. 

These men are colloquially known as “reply guys.” While no reply guy is the same — each reply guy is annoying in his own way — there are a few common qualities to watch out for. In general, reply guys tend to have few followers. Their responses are overly familiar, as if they know the person they’re targeting, though they usually don’t. They also tend to reply to only women; the most prolific reply guys fill the role for dozens of women trying to tweet in peace. 

It’s usually pretty easy to ID a reply guy. The sheer volume of responses is a reliable indicator. But there’s still some literature on the subject. In a 2018 piece for McSweeney’s, for instance, Emlyn Crenshaw wrote an extremely funny Reply Guy Constitution, which focuses above all else on men’s commitment to “weigh in on women’s thoughts at every possible opportunity.” 

Two scientists, @shrewshrew (who asked to be referred to by her Twitter handle only) and Scott Barolo, created the Twitter account @9ReplyGuys based on the experiences of women in STEM.

“We came up with the idea of the 9 Reply Guys after noticing that the kinds of tweets and comments make to women on Twitter (and in real life) follow really predictable patterns,” @shrewshrew explained via Twitter DM.

SEE ALSO: Anthony Hopkins, cannibalism icon, is the happiest man on Twitter

“It’s annoying because Reply Guys always think they’ve made some brilliant contribution, but it’s the same nonsense any woman, person of color, or LGBTQ person has experienced hundreds of times,” she said.

The account divides reply guys into nine subcategories, each based on a reply guy behavior the two observed in the wild. The Gaslighter, for example, is devoted to minimizing women’s experiences, and the Cookie Manster is basically the poster child for #NotAllMen. 

All nine have one thing in common, though, as @shrewshrew pointed out: “Their goal is to control the conversation.”

Reply guys aren’t just lurking on STEM grounds, either. Petrana Radulovic, a reporter at Polygon, had a reply guy experience that was truly, deeply weird. 

“I had this fella who followed me because I had Cookie Monster in my profile pic and he just kept replying to everything I posted trying to get me to talk about Muppets,” she explained over Twitter DM.

Like most reply guys, he was relentless. Eventually, Radulovic muted him. Notably, though, she never blocked him. 

SEE ALSO: Is ‘don’t feed the trolls’ actually good advice? It’s complicated.

“I have that internalized female niceness where I can’t make anyone mad,” she said. “I [also] fear men’s retaliation and muting will keep ’em quiet, but they’ll never know.” (Users aren’t notified that they’ve been muted.)

“Muting will keep ’em quiet, but they’ll never know.”

Another user, who asked to remain anonymous, said she’s noticed several reply guys in her mentions. Unlike Radulovic’s reply guy, her reply guys respond to each tweet individually. “It’s always regarding the content of [my] tweets, contextual,” she said. But it still happens like clockwork. 

She’s also chosen to mute instead of block. None of her reply guys are “consistent harassers,” she said.

Still, reply guy behavior can escalate quickly — which is why a lot of women choose not to block the offenders. I once had a reply guy whose comments started off innocuous, then steadily became more frequent — and more suggestive — when I stopped liking his replies. Eventually, he also found me on Instagram and Facebook, where he continued to engage with the vast majority of my posts.

SEE ALSO: Why is everyone on Twitter talking about towels?

I didn’t block him, though. I didn’t want to make him angry. One never knows how far a man will go to make a woman’s life hell.

But what makes a reply guy reply in the first place? It’s been suggested — including in a piece from Raw Story — that the reply guy phenomenon is an instance of benevolent sexism. 

As with other types of benevolent sexism, like catcalling disguised as “compliments” and paternalistic pseudo-concern, reply guy behavior can quickly grow frightening if the man doesn’t feel his target is giving him the attention he deserves. (Feeling entitled to women’s energy has, of course, been a longstanding problem for men.)

If you’re a woman on the internet, there’s a high chance you find none of this surprising. But what should you do if you suddenly find a reply guy in your mentions?

Of course, how you choose to deal with a reply guy depends on your specific circumstances. If you think you’ve got a shot at shooing them away, you could hit them with one of @9ReplyGuys’s descriptions. You could reply, if you want. (Don’t pretend you don’t love a good dunk.) If you feel unsafe or if you don’t want to see their garbage anymore, you could mute or block. It’s your feed. They’re the interloper, not you.

And if they get too annoying, you can always commiserate with … pretty much anyone who isn’t a man. I’m sure they’d be thrilled to hear from someone who is not a reply guy.