Link Roundup! -The Toast

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ugh, roxane is great even when writing a “hey, broke something in my ankle” post:

When you’re fat, one of your biggest fears is the fall while you’re alone and need to call EMTs scenario. It’s a fear I have nurtured over the years and now that fear has finally come true. “And you’re still alive,” she said. I suppose that’s the thing about fear. You dread it but you have little choice but to endure.

Thankfully I had my phone in my pocket, so I pulled myself into the anteroom of the bathroom where I could have a signal. My foot was starting to hurt but nowhere near as badly as I thought it should hurt based on lots of ER viewing. 911 answered promptly. At the same time, there was a plumbing crisis but I couldn’t cope with that and my fucked up foot so I just moved it to the corner of my mind. While on the phone with the kind 911 operator I blurted out, “I’m fat,” like, it was some deep mark of shame and he said, “That’s not a problem.”


Our own Sulagna Misra on being ambiguously brown:

Even my high school, where students and teachers alike grilled me about being Indian, has changed; when my brother went to the same school seven years later, he had several more brown classmates and much less ennui about being one of only a few brown kids in school. When cartoon shows I loved as a kid had Indian characters, they were caricatures of foreignness—like Sanjay in Fairly Odd Parents, whose white voiceover actor used a heavily exaggerated accent to play the character. So I was delightfully surprised to find the recent show Sanjay & Craig, with an Indian American actor (a long-time favorite of mine) voicing the lead.


I just really love the Parisian butt plug public art thing, and that it’s called Tree, and that’s all. THOSE BASTARDS!


why on earth should you be allowed to Stand Your Ground when your domestic partner attacks you in your own home:

Most recently, Kidd raised this argument in vigorously pursuing a murder case against Whitlee Jones, whose screams for help as her boyfriend pulled her down the street by her hair prompted a neighbor to call the cops during a 2012 altercation. When the officer arrived that night, the argument had already ended and Jones had fled the scene. While she was out, Jones decided to leave her boyfriend, Eric Lee, and went back to the house to pack up her things. She didn’t even know the police officer had been there earlier that night, her lawyer Mary Ford explained. She packed a knife to protect herself, and as she exited the house, she says Lee attacked her and she stabbed Lee once in defense. He died, although Jones says she did not intend to kill him.

On October 3, Circuit Judge J.C. Nicholson sided with Jones and granted her Stand Your Ground immunity, meaning she is exempt from trial on the charge. In response to Kidd’s argument that individuals could not invoke Stand Your Ground to defend against violence in their own homes, Nicholson said that dynamic would create the “nonsensical result” that a victim of domestic abuse could defend against an attacker outside of the home, but not inside the home – where the most vicious domestic violence is likely to occur.


Oh, man.

Abbott has spent eight months now with the sofa set, and some days, she can shrug off the costs. She’ll sink into the cushions just before her kids get out of school and say she wouldn’t trade the feeling “for a million bucks.” Normal families have sofas, she says, and you’ll do what it takes to feel normal.


pumpkin riot


Sarah Miller wrote this incredible thing about trying to profile Anna Nicole Smith:

I wrote a first draft, in which, without spelling everything out, I attempted to give some real sense of that day. “I can’t publish this,” my editor said, and in her defense, I’m sure she was right. I wrote another version that made it sound like I’d had fun, which took hours and hours, because it was not real; writing something that is not real is not impossible, but it is very close to it. Through every long moment I worked on it I cursed myself for not taking that stupid trip to Magic Mountain, which would have made it all so much easier. Anyway, they published that version, and I got my money.


please be real


pete’s dragon remake with robert redford (breathes into paper bag)

oh it’s about the environment now ok still gonna be there for u pete’s dragon

NO NO NO THERE WILL BE NO MUSIC BURN IT


I went to see Annabelle on Saturday night, and it was much scarier than I expected and I watched most of it from behind my purse, and then we drove home and got into bed and the power went out for NO REASON, like no storm, no winds, NOTHING, and it was terrifying.


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Oh oh oh oh who else read this article about TB today? http://www.buzzfeed.com/natalieshure/you-never-th... It was fascinating and strange and thought-provoking and great.
6 replies · active 545 weeks ago
Thinking about it now, it makes sense. Especially how men's restrooms have seats. But I just assumed it was a unisex/cost saving/oversight deal.
Unisex/cost saving/oversight.


13 replies · active 545 weeks ago
Jeez, you read that Reddit link and you really gotta wonder how the patriarchy is still going strong with dopes like that guy at the helm.
7 replies · active 545 weeks ago
Women should be allowed to 'Stand Your Ground' ANYWHERE at all times when they feel threatened by men. This would solve any number of problems, if harassers knew we could shoot them with impunity. Just sayin'
I saw the trailer for Annabelle when I went to see Dracula Untold and was PETRIFIED.
2 replies · active 545 weeks ago
Hey, this has nothing to do with the Link Roundup, but @Briony_Fields, where are you? I went to check the post from the Friday Open Thread about that awful, awful guy, but I can't for the life of me find you or your post. Maybe I'm just crazy (this is a distinct possibility) and can't work the internet right, but I really hope everything is okay. Guys, is this just me? Can anyone find that thread?
5 replies · active 545 weeks ago
Oh I have been DYING to see Anabelle, but I have a "no horror films in the theatre" policy, because when you watch horror films in the theatre there is no escaaaaaaape (unless you want to run out and CAUSE A SCENE, truly the greatest horror imaginable).

Also I will literally scream and yelp during the scary moments, a reaction which my partner finds utterly bizarre, and now his reaction to MY reaction to the film makes me think that maybe most people do not do this and it would be considered inappropriate in public. Even though it is technically the reaction such films were DESIGNED to elicit?
7 replies · active 545 weeks ago
The article on the rent-to-own places was so infuriating. Fucking ghouls.
28 replies · active 545 weeks ago
The toilet guy reminds me of this Awl article where a dude had never heard of someone flushing with their feet: http://www.theawl.com/2013/10/why-do-you-animals-...

"Well, someone posted this survey that was claiming that two-thirds of Americans flush public toilets with their feet. And that just did not seem correct to me. I had never foot-flushed in a public bathroom, nor had I heard of anyone else foot-flushing. So reading that story was like being told that two-thirds of Americans were obsessed with some sci-fi series I’d never known existed. One third? Maybe that could fly under my radar. But two-thirds is a lot of people."
10 replies · active 545 weeks ago
I'm quite desensitized when it comes to horror, after that Asian horror binge I did when I was 16-17. And nothing beats the sheer joy of feeling your heart rate slow down a bit after jumping in your seat. :)
My front door opened by itself on Saturday night. It was probably just because there are often drafts and breezes in the halls in my building due to the central air, but for a second I thought, "This is how I die."
6 replies · active 545 weeks ago
Allow me to summarize every French comment section on the butt plug installation:

"This is indecent, it's a provocation!"
"How come you know what a butt plug looks like?"
2 replies · active 545 weeks ago
One of the most terrifying things that has ever happened to me was on that day in December 2012 that was the "Mayan apocalypse" or whatever. I had been at an early office Christmas party, and got an apocalypse preparation kit in a white elephant exchange (so like a bottle of wine, a book, some energy bars, a flashlight). I got home and my husaband and I were joking around about what if it really is the apocalypse ha ha ha ha and planning what we would do and stuff.

And then the power went out. And then we heard large booms. And then we went to our back windows and through the trees there were flashes in the distance. It looked like faraway lightning, but it was coming from the ground AND IT WAS DIFFERENT COLORS. Like an alien invasion or something. It went on for a long time, long enough for us to look at it through multiple windows and fully lose our minds, maybe 3-5 minutes?

It turned out to be a transformer explosion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z0Vlv5jXOc
2 replies · active 545 weeks ago
That is funny, my wife and I watched The Conjuring last night (she got it on Netflix for some reason, I guess). It scary enough I guess, though the hype for it made it seem like I was going to have some kind of fear-seizures or whatever, and it was mostly the standard, "people move into a house, a bunch of weird shit happens, &c," like every ghost movie since forever. I guess we're better at weird shit special effects, so that was good.

I was definitely put off by how straight-up Christian that movie was -- even The Exorcist, I'd argue, isn't THAT Christian (at least in The Exorcist the implication is that the priests aren't even a hundred percent sure that they actually can exorcise a demon using the power of Christ [and, spoiler, they can't]; in this movie the dude is like, "Oh, yeah, you got a demon, just get a Catholic priest out here to do a spell and clean it up, you'll be fine).
21 replies · active 545 weeks ago
My mom has a creepy, Annabelle-esque doll. It's a regular doll, but HUGE. Like, it's a life-size five year old girl. Mom loves it and refused to get rid of it, even after the doll's head fell off. The doll now sits in the guest room closet, on a small child's chair, holding its blonde, dead-eyed head in its lap.

It's good for scaring the shit out of guests, though.
5 replies · active 545 weeks ago
Also, off-topic, but I would like to thank you for all your lipstick recommendations on the most recent open thread! I returned the expensive Nars lipstick and got a Sephora brand one and 2 Nyx ones and a lip pencil, all for less money than the Nars lipstick had originally cost. The Sephora one is really great. The Nyx lipsticks have less staying power (and there's also a weird smell, almost like cleaning products?) but for a $6 lipstick, I can't complain.
2 replies · active 545 weeks ago
I have lots of thoughts about the lovely Sulagna's piece on being ambiguously brown which I'm too hungover to properly articulate. It made me think a lot about how my daddy and uncle (both Hinjews, an unusual enough combination now, let alone in London in the 1950s and 60s) dealt with the 'what are you' - my father was relentlessly exoticised and romanticised, and his heritage was thought to be the most glamorous thing in the WORLD, and my uncle (two years older) was hideously horribly bullied for the same 'foreignness.' My uncle denies his background at all costs and has an anglicised name; I still remember a Christmas day when I was little listening to his next door neighbour chatter at great length about the envy they all felt at my uncle's 'incredible tan'.

Nothing on God's green earth could persuade me to see Annabelle, I'm scared enough of dolls as it is.
4 replies · active 545 weeks ago
This is an off-topic question, but has anyone had a problem submitting comments lately? I assume this is a consequence of my old, obsolete browser (state-issued, so it's not getting updated until it's at least five versions behind), but sometimes I submit a comment and it gets rejected and I get a little blue message window -- but because of my browser the window is blank, so I don't know what the message is. Has anyone else got this warning? What does the message say? What am I doing wrong, I must know!.
7 replies · active 545 weeks ago
This is something that puzzles me daily. How they get to be in control of everything when most of them are stupid, crazy or both?
1 reply · active 545 weeks ago
I got a lovely postcard in the mail on Saturday from a Toastie from Canada, the front is a diagram of LE LAPIN with a bunch of body parts in French (!!!), but part of the front of got torn off! It came from someone whose name starts super_no, but that's all that's left! Thank you, super_no[...], sorry I don't know who you are!

Uhh, as for my own postcards, SORRY I will send them out now. *hangs head in shame*
2 replies · active 545 weeks ago
The pumpkin riot was simultaneously the greatest and worst thing to happen to my Twitter feed this weekend. Greatest because the response was fucking hilarious, and worst because it's so goddamn true.
The Fug Girls recently posted a link to an article about how women used to fend off scoundrels with hatpins. Maybe hatpins need a comeback?
5 replies · active 545 weeks ago
I am just baffled that he never once forgot to lift the seat or just otherwise sat down on the toilet seat and thought to himself, "Who cares if this is 'for women?' It is so much more comfortable to poop this way and I am going to continue from now on."
"Normal families have sofas, she says, and you’ll do what it takes to feel normal." Oof. This was such a punch in the gut. Growing up, I didn't understand how my parents got themselves into financial messes like this, but as I grew up I realized they were just searching for that feeling of normalcy. So tough.

Also, a Pete's Dragon with no music??? But that whole movie IS Helen Reddy standing at the top of a lighthouse and singing "Candle on the Water" to the sea!
Creepy doll stories are the best (except for that Robert doll, that is some terrifying shit)! On a semi-related note, I went on a heritage cemetery tour yesterday and it was AWESOME! Would do it again in a heartbeat.
I think it's hilarious when people don't know how to use a toilet and I don't care what terrible things that my or may not mean about me.
That Anna Nicole Smith piece was quite a read. I'm a bit too young to remember her when she came off as anything other than "already dead inside," and then she was actually dead, and I just remember seeing the tabloids in grocery stores and feeling very surreal and unsurprised.

Also interesting was the discussion of "scenes" in celebrity magazine pieces-- I've always been so enamored with and baffled by profile pieces whenever I occasionally buy a Vogue or Elle, and it's kind of vindicating to know that the "scene" structure is conscious and codified. I wonder if the celebrities are thinking in the same terms, of giving "scenes," when they are being interviewed.
HOLD UP, SC:

"The Post and Courier, which originally reported prosecutors’ position, has been doing a series on domestic violence over the past few months, in which it found that women are dying at a rate of one every 12 days from domestic abuse in South Carolina, a state “awash in guns, saddled with ineffective laws and lacking enough shelters for the battered … a state where the deck is stacked against women trapped in the cycle of abuse.” More than 70 percent of those who kill their spouse had “multiple prior arrests on those charges” and the majority spent just days in jail."

My God, this article is terrifying. WTF, South Carolina, just...(let's out one big, sad sigh).
1 reply · active 545 weeks ago
This is off-topic but did anyone follow that HORRIFYING author stalking debate that broke out over the weekend? The short version is, a YA author got a bad review and decided the best course of action was to stalk the reviewer for months, dig up her real name (since she reviewed under a penname) CALL HER AT WORK and SHOW UP TO HER HOUSE like some kind of writerly Michael Myers scuffling around in the bushes. And then she wrote a 5000-word article for the Guardian about it: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/18/am-i... and the comments are full of people going "good for her, standing up to that nasty bullying reviewer!" and basically we need to nuke the publishing industry from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
7 replies · active 545 weeks ago
I am in so so so much sympathetic pain for Roxane. I fucked up my foot a few years ago (not as dramatically as she has, but still) and re-injured it this spring and foot/ankle/weight-bearing injuries are the absolute worst. You're utterly helpless and it never goes away. (Six months on crutches just as I was starting grad school! Not fun. Not fun at all.)
3 replies · active 545 weeks ago
Who else is pumped as hell about the new Sleater-Kinney album & tour?
6 replies · active 545 weeks ago
I went to see a very scary play on Friday. It was a mashup of The Turn of the Screw and The Shining. There were only about 20 seats in the "theater," which was set up like a living room, and the action happened all around us, not on a separate stage. The first really scary part was when I saw my girlfriend's eyes get really big and I slowly turned around to see one of the ghosts creeping up behind us. It was all I could do not to scream right then - though I did shriek out loud a few times later in the play!
3 replies · active 545 weeks ago
Today in women living their best lives: the woman who sat beside me on the bus with gorgeous henna on her hands which included portraits of Indian women who looked smug. The rest of her outfit was on point too, but smug lady hand portraits.
I referred to that buttblog tree as a "buttplug for a giant" on the weekend, and I was really sad that they took it down. THE GIANT NEEDS HIS/HER BUTTPLUG.
1 reply · active 545 weeks ago
"When you’re fat, one of your biggest fears is the fall while you’re alone and need to call EMTs scenario."

It never occurred to me to be afraid of this until now D:
1 reply · active 545 weeks ago
The reports about actor Misty Upham's death are appalling http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/20...
"Misty was afraid of the Auburn PD officiers with good reason. In an incident prior to her disappearance, the Auburn PD came to pick up Misty on an involuntary transport to the ER. She was cuffed and placed in a police car. Some of the officiers began to taunt and tease her while she was in the car....After Misty arrived at the ER we went to see her and she has a swollen jaw, black eye and scratches and bruises on her shoulder. I asked the ER staff what happened and they said Misty was brought in like that. Misty said she couldn’t remember what happened but thats why she feared the police."
Ambiguously brown, that is a very useful phase. Because I am totally white, except where we grew up we were not considered white, and so growing up we spent lots of time being asked, "Where are you from? No, WHERE are you FROM?" Because 'here' was clearly untrue, I had an olive complexion and Real White People looked like they were from Scandinavia. Then we moved to California and suddenly we were incredibly totally white, except occasionally people talk to us in Spanish.
I am confused as to why the law can't apply the normal self-defense provision rather than a Stand Your Ground law in the Whitlee Jones case? The article doesn't mention this at all. It's damn obvious given the circumstances that this is a case of justifiable self-defence so why are they resorting to a law that was originally drafted to cover a slightly different purpose? Usually judges and advocates only use laws with borderline applicability when there is no clear law that covers that specific case. So what on earth is going on here?
I can't believe anyone who saw an ad for Annabelle would go see the actual movie. I was so freaked out by a super-short commercial, and then that night all my folded shopping bags unfolded and were crinkling all over my bedroom and I was positive if I turned on the light she'd be standing over me. Straight-up petrified.
I got a toastpost today! From Simone, with no username indicated. Thank you Simone! I love it! I wish to send you one in return! How can I find you?
Can someone tell me about toastpost? and how to get involved? :)

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