On the history of gay cruising in Prospect Park:
“When I got there, I found the park filled with men in the same horny, hungry state of mind I was in … I can’t remember ever seeing so many gorgeous black men in any one place,” Rory Buchanan wrote in his short story “Summer Chills,” from Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. Buchanan was describing the Vale of Cashmere, a secluded patch of wilderness in Prospect Park that’s been the unofficial locus of gay cruising in Brooklyn since the 1970s. Once a formal Victorian garden, it’s now an unkempt maze of paths surrounding a sunken fountain filled with reeds and moss.
Our publishing company crunched the numbers for me, and currently 25% of our readers use an ad blocker (and do not whitelist us), which is…a lot! That’s a lot of revenue lost. If you would like to offset your ad blocker usage (no judgment here) in full, you can honestly do that with $5 a month, $60 for the year.
The scary thing for independent sites, basically, is that that percentage is going up STEEPLY every year, and plenty of sites are facing a 40% ad blocker rate.
How on earth could a small town embezzler go through $53.7 million? Horses, duh:
In 2013, a small-town city official by the name of Rita Crundwell was sentenced to almost 20 years in federal prison for stealing at least $53.7 million from the city of Dixon, Ill.
Crundwell, the town’s longtime comptroller, used the millions to build a horse-breeding empire so enormous that federal investigators are still auctioning it off, piece by ill-gotten piece.
Now the U.S. Marshals Service is taking bids for Crundwell’s hundreds of horse trophies and ribbons, piled up from the years when she dominated quarter horse breeding championships and was known to envious competitors and fans simply as “Rita.”
A really grim and infuriating look at the journey that women in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland make to get abortion care:
In both the Republic and Northern Ireland, however, women cannot be prevented from seeking safe and legal abortion abroad; in the past 30 years, more than 160,000 women have travelled from Northern Ireland and the Republic for a termination. The phenomenon rarely attracts much attention: two-thirds of British people are unaware that the laws on abortion in Northern Ireland are different from those in the rest of the UK. After the success of the equal marriage referendum in Ireland earlier this year, campaigners are calling for a referendum on repealing the eighth amendment. Last month, thousands marched through Dublin in support of decriminalisation. But while popular support is growing across the UK for reform in Northern Ireland, there is little political will among politicians across the spectrum, Catholic and Protestant.
HELL, NO (Ask a Manager):
I desperately want the carpool nose picker to completely and permanently stop this form of personal maintenance while traveling in the carpool.
Point to note: The picker always sits in front passenger seat unless it’s picker’s turn to drive.
If picker wants to “pick and flick” in picker’s own vehicle or those of the other carpoolers, that’s one thing (still hugely gross), but when picker picks while sitting right next to me in MY car, I am equal parts disgusted and pissed off! I really want this behavior to stop, in my car in particular, although in the entire carpool would be ideal! Please advise.
Days before police scoured a dusty Texas ranch to search for her brother’s remains, a stranger called Maria Interiano. He knew Santos’ middle name and that he had a scar on one knee. And he knew that Santos had been missing since he crossed the US-Mexico border in 2013.
“He’s alive,” the man said. “I’ll give you a telephone number to call. They’ll tell you what to do to get him out.”
Maria would do anything to see her brother again; she was desperate. The strangers who said they could get him back knew that, too. They led her on a frantic odyssey in September from her attic apartment near Boston to a bodega in East Boston and finally to the Walmart in Lynn, where she wired them ransom money to ensure her brother’s safe passage. A man named Victor assured her that Santos was on his way.
Soon after, Victor’s phone went dead.
I actually really liked this (Jaya, as a Real New York Kid From Birth, shared it on Facebook, so I feel like I can share it with her street cred, my own having just been a drunk and stupid kid paying too much for rent in NYC in 2005, which was…sublime, still):
I can sympathize. But I think there’s more to these “the city is dead now” complaints than money. People have pronounced St. Marks Place dead many times over the past centuries — when it became poor, and then again when it became rich, and then again when it returned to being poor, and so on. My theory is that the neighborhood hasn’t stopped being cool because it’s too expensive now; it stops being cool for each generation the second we stop feeling cool there. Any claim to objectivity is clouded by one’s former glory.
I know this well. As a teenage girl in the 1990s East Village, every door was open to me and my friends. There was no party we could not crash, no person we could not make out with and no intoxicant we would not be offered. The city was ours. In the pre-Giuliani era, a fellow East Village woman reminds me, “You could still piss on the street.” Having been a teenager in the East Village is like having been president. Whatever else you do, you can’t stop thinking about how you no longer run the world.
I finally started watching Outlander (read it rapturously in high school when I was the horniest living girl) and I’m having a real good time. I wasn’t a feminist in 1743, so that’s been a big help.
This speech by Ryan Murphy was pretty moving:
Okay, so this is what happened the first time I ever picked up a guy. I was 16, and I was working in a shoe store in Indianapolis called Adam’s Shoes. I was previous fired from Floor Shop Shoes because I refused to touch feet, so to me, Adam’s Shoes was this amazing place where I could just toss the Candie’s of my girlfriends. It was a great job. And a good-looking guy, 25, came in. I was very nervous, and he picked me up and we went back to his house, and he poured me a Diet Coke. I swear to God I asked for it. And I glanced at his coffee table, and there was a copy of the New York Native, and there was this horrible story about this new disease called AIDS. And I read that article as he poured the beverage, and I fled out the door. And in many ways in my life, I could tell you that I have never stopped running.
How the Clinton White House handled DOMA and what it means today:
“We were attempting at the time, in a very reactionary Congress,” Bill Clinton told an audience in 2009, “to head off an attempt to send a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to the states.” Four former senators — including Tom Daschle, who made the claim in 2011 — raised the idea in a Supreme Court brief in 2013. Clinton later cited that brief when, in a Washington Post op-ed, he called for the law he signed to be struck down by the court. Hillary Clinton just last week called her husband’s decision to sign DOMA “a defensive action.”
There is no contemporaneous evidence, however, to support the claim that the Clinton White House considered a possible federal constitutional amendment to be a concern, based on a BuzzFeed News review of the thousands of documents released earlier this year by the Clinton Presidential Library about same-sex couples’ marriage rights and the Defense of Marriage Act. In the documents, which include correspondence from a wide array of White House and Justice Department officials, no one even hints that Bill Clinton’s thinking or actions regarding DOMA were animated by the threat of a federal constitutional amendment.
In which our resident linguist live-tweets Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On!!!
We have the most epic ten-part deleted comment of the weekend for you! One man, one laptop, one VERY strong set of opinions about the hot blonde triplets in Beauty and the Beast:
Also, he thinks Ursula had to die:
What the hell, that is a level of thought and analysis into some extremely minor characters in Beauty and the Beast that I have never even considered before. And weird analysis of the virginity of fictional characters. In a children’s film from more than twenty years ago. Wow.
What bothers me the most about it is that I feel the need to refute some of his arguments, but wouldn’t that make me just as bad as him?
Let’s do it quietly to each other! Serving girls wouldn’t necessarily know how to cook, there was probably a person who did most/all of the cooking in the tavern.
Serving girls who “lead a really rough life, needing to work just to survive” would have been much more likely to be prostitutes than virgins.
And how very dare he claim that Frollo and Lumière are at the same level of misogyny and general awfulness!
How dare he claim that anyone, living or fictional, trumps Frollo’s misogyny and general awfulness! (I have very detailed rankings of the relative moral depravity of Disney villains and look forward to the day when that can be a genuine contribution to a Toast comment section)
Forget the comments – pitch itttt!
yep, would read the heck out of this
Thank you both!!
Also, ignoring all of the other men in town, particularly Le Feu, in order to focus on Gaston and his biceps, doesn’t imply virginity! How does that make sense? If they weren’t virgins, they’d be distracted by every single man in town, unable to continue their single-minded pursuit of Gaston?
Also, it’s Barney Stinson, and he is just as fictional as Gaston.
God right? I don’t know why that part in particular bothered me, except that you hear Barney Stinson’s name SO VERY MUCH in HIMYM so how on earth could you get it wrong when you are the guy who is writing ten zillion words about some trivial characters in a children’s movie from 20 years ago???
It absolutely dismantles his credibility as unbiased arbiter of Disney side-characters’ virginity.
I share this impulse, so I am going to say, no, it’s okay, someone really should point out to him that in a world where witches cast spells and a teapot talks, the French Revolution probably didn’t happen in quite the same way.
Now I’m imagining a sentient guillotine… Marat taking a bath in a talking tub…
No one fights like Danton…
I. . .would watch the hell out of that, tbh.
Seriously.
Also, I’m not sure how dude gets “sleeps around a lot” to be worse than “stalking and attempted murder”*, but that ethical scale gives me the jibblies.
*Although to be fair I’ve not seen all of How I Met Your Mother or Three and a Half Men, so maybe that happens on those too? But I feel like it would have been mentioned.
I lover his claim that “Satre made me who I am”
Wait. I missed that part and it sounds suspiciously like something Dirtbag Ethics Professor would say. He would comment on a six month old post about Disney characters.
Also on a post that’s 6 months old…
the combination of those things with the narrative about the French Revolution makes me think that he might be a neoreactionary or neoreactionary-adjacent
which is still pretty weird, because why would you read or post on The Toast in that case
The closest that I can come to it off the top of my head would be “Marauder Shields”, the last defeatable enemy in the Mass Effect games, which has been the subject of his own interminable fan comic. And maybe Parmak, who’s only mentioned in passing by Garak during a DS9 episode, but has been the subject of a lot of three-way shipping between him, Dr. Bashir and Garak.
I don’t think I have ever thought that deeply about any minor characters in a Disney movie, and I’m torn between being a little impressed and a lot concerned about what else that dude has sitting on his computer
I *did* think pretty hard about those characters while discussing that post! And now I’m mad at this guy for ruining Overthinking Minor Disney Characters for all of us.
(ha ha “ruined,” I say, as if I won’t jump right into it next time Mallory writes a Disney movie post.)
Wow, deleted commenter. You don’t have to wear yourself out correcting all of the internet with your deep knowledge about the French Revolution all at once. Take a break, have some tea, then carry on with your righteous crusade.
Also, anyone who cites deep knowledge of Two and a Half Men and How I Met Your Mother in the same self-righteous comment stream is obviously up to no good. (edit: And misspells one of the characters’ names TWICE in the comment stream.)
I was just thinking, that is a weird cross-reference of interests.
Yeah, I hate myself a little bit, because the first thing I noticed about the deleted comments was the wrong name. It’s Barney Stinson, not Stinnet. (Why do I know this? Why did I watch so much HIMYM? Why am I still angry about how they ended it? These are questions I cannot answer.)
I think everyone in the world is angry about that finale except the people who wrote it and approved it, including the actors AND people who never even saw the show. Seriously, it was shit. (I say this as someone who watched all but the last half of that season because I saw it coming and just was like NOPE and when it happened even though I thought if I didn’t watch it maybe it wouldn’t happen I was filled with rage!)
HAMILWEEN HAPPENED
The littlest Ham, with archnemesis Aaron Berrt
(the pictures are links)
Very special Halloween treat from LMM
Hamilton costume roundup
I aspire to one day be a parent like these. What else are children for if not dressing up like historical figures?
I just saw that on YouTube and it was the best! So proud that Littlest Ham is a Littlest Toastie!
AARON BERRT, oh my god
That took me a moment and now I love it so much!
Heart melted.
The Littlest Ham has killed me dead. I am posting this comment from beyond the grave.
And she met Lin!
*shovels dirt onto grave*
LITTLEST HAM 9EVER.
(It seems weird to be squeeing over a thing I’ve yet to see or listen to, but all the Hamilton squee makes me happy nonetheless, soooo…)
I think tiny children dressed in historical costumes as important historical figures is something we can all enjoy, regardless of musical context.
THOSE TEENY PANTALOONS
Batcat!
That is one excellent fuzzy hot water bottle.
HAMILTON news: On our long car ride this weekend, my my wife finally listened to the Hamilton soundtrack with me. And between giggling at the jokes and references and lines in French, I’m pretty sure she totally loved it.
But the best moment of all was, after just barely managing to keep it together through “Stay Alive (Reprise),” she turned to me at the end of “Who Lives, Who Dies…” when Eliza mentions the Orphanage, and has a single tear slowly rolling down her face. It was so picture-perfect, I couldn’t believe it.
Also, several hours later in the evening she calls out to me from across the house and says, “After all that, he did throw away his shot.” So I guess what I’m trying to say is, I think the Hamilton fandom just grew by one.
tomorrow there’ll be more of us
“remember, Sartre philandered women”
I’ve never seen philander used as a verb before.
Philander? I hardly know her….
well, certainly not a transitive verb!
a gerund, *maybe*
I kind of like it? I’m opposed in general to this sort of thing, but it works.
It sounds like laundering. So, going through a lot of them with plausible deniability?
Re: gentrification– here is an exceptionally gross and blatant example that took place in the south Bronx last week. This party was thrown under a bridge that doubles as a homeless encampment. http://gothamist.com/2015/11/01/real_estate_devel…
And here is a very thoughtful summary and criticism by south Bronx activist Ed Garcia Conde http://www.welcome2thebronx.com/wordpress/2015/10…
Tom Wolfe is KICKING himself for not writing that party before it happened.
(Seriously, though, I cannot believe anyone thought that was a good idea. I just. Gah.)
Right?! It feels straight out of an 80s movie skewering rich people (sooo…a Tom Wolfe piece). Except it’s 2015 and not fiction. Money + lack of awareness is really fucking scary.
Don’t kids watch/read Less Than Zero anymore?
“A cheap holiday in other people’s misery” (from the Sex Pistols’ “Holiday in the Sun”) has never been more appropriate.
i am very confused by the word “rave” being used in this context. the last time i went to anything characterized as a “rave”, it was a bunch of high-as-fuck 19 years olds in phat pants dancing to techno in a filthy warehouse. do words not mean what they used to mean???
If you’ve got some time, read the whole story of Rita Crundwell, Horse Embezzler. WORTH IT. http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/Decemb…
Wow, amazing.
This is BATSHIT and I love it.
Un-fucking-believable. And immediately shared with everyone in my office.
Ah, yeah. As someone who’s a resident of the part of Illinois where Reagan is still worshipped uncritically–even though his childhood here was mostly miserable and he came back as seldom as he could after leaving–it amuses me to no end that Crundwell is now the second-best-known former resident of Dixon. (I have no beef with the town itself, which seemed nice when I’ve driven through in the past, and there are some nice scenic places along the Rock River nearby, including bald eagle nesting sites.)
Is anyone able to walk me through how to whitelist The Toast? I have the AdBlock app on my phone and iPad, and I can’t figure it out.
I don’t know about the app, on my computer you can click on the little stop sign that says how many ads it has blocked and tell it that you don’t want adblock to run on pages on this domain. I assume the mechanic would be similar on mobile?
I whitelisted The Toast a couple years ago, but have never seen the ads, so I don’t even know. :/
I went to an immensely rock and roll pumpkin carving party. I did the hattifatteners on one side and the groke on the other. It was remarkably zen actually, doing the carving while sat chatting to friends!
I love this. A+. Well done.
Thanks! I am really pleased with how they came out, I had never carved a pumpkin before!
Moomins!
Moomins forever.
Did you roast the seeds? That’s my favorite part.
Nope, all the insides went into a bag and onto the compost heap – i thinkthese pumpkins are bred for size and roundness rather than usefulness of flesh and seeds. Life is too short to scrabble round pumpkin guts!
MOOMINLAND PUMPKINS YESSSSSS.
One year when I was little I went out for Hallowe’en as the Snork Maiden, and, predictably, not a single person handing out candy had the faintest idea who that was.
My own house is not good for trick or treaters, because it is secluded amongst trees and there are no sidewalks, only very dangerous roads. So, my wife and i went to my parents’ house to give out candy, because I loooove giving out candy on Halloween.
ANYWAY, these three kids come to the door, “Well, what have we got here?”
“Zombie prom queen” says the first one, a little sheepishly.
“Zombie prom queen, very good, have some candy.”
The other two are a boy and a girl; the boy has a puffy vest and a ballcap with a pine tree on it, the girl has a pink sweater with a shooting-star rainbow combination. The girl opens her mouth like she’s about to explain, and then kind of sighs like she’s ALREADY explained it a hundred times and no one gets it.
“It’s just…these two twins, from a TV show…”
“Sure,” I say, “you’re the kids from Gravity Falls.” (reader: I have seen one episode of Gravity Falls).
These two kids light up like jack o’ lanterns and I swear, reader, they bounced with joy at finally being recognized.
This is the only good deed I think I need to do for the next couple weeks.
I recognized that a young teen girl (14, maybe?) was dressed as someone (or something?) from the manga/tv show Attack on Titan, which I only know exists because of Tumblr. And I think I made her night, and her mother who was standing on the sidewalk punched the air and cheered, “YES! She KNEW it!”
I felt like a hero.
I had three kids come up to the door dressed as Batman, Robin, and the Joker (the Batman kid was even doing the BatBale growl) so I asked the Robin which Robin he was dressed as, and he said “Tim Drake! You’re the first person who’s asked me!” and gave me a high-five.
The funny thing is, I don’t read comics at all. I just have a friend who’s really into Batman.
That kid has good taste in Robins, and I bet that made their night.
My apartment gets no trick-or-treaters, so I helped with candy duty at a friend’s house, where they were told to buy at least 1,000 pieces of candy by their neighbors. It was a madhouse, but guessing kids’ costumes right was so much fun. They had great reactions. And one kid guessed what my costume was, and he was the only person to get it all night, so I told him so, and he ran off to his mom yelling “I guessed her costume right! And I’m the first person to get it!”
But what was your costume? 🙂
I had no trick or treaters come to my house before I had to leave for the Halloween party I was helping out with, but I did do a Halloween 5K and made a college student very happy when I recognized and complimented her on her Totoro costume.
My baby girl didn’t go this year. Middle school angst + “nobody to go with”. Made me so sad!!
Oh! Poor girl! I hope next year is better!
I dressed up (for work) as Finn from Adventure Time, and on BART home I happened to be sitting near a dude in a Jake hat. He was trying to do the stealthy phone pic thing, so I waved and brought out my BMO plushie. He was thrilled.
Anyway, also:
Deleted commenter, “Yeah guys did you know about this thing called The French Revolution? It was super-bad, you guys. I am an expert in history so of course *I* have heard of it, but you probably didn’t know. They killed a bunch of people.”
“In a France where there were vengeful fairies and magic mirrors and mobile candelabras roaming around and anachronistic Eiffel Tower references it was like totally a big deal. Really. It totally happened in that France.”
Deleted commenter may be a candidate for mansplaining Hall of Fame.
I’m not sure if I should feel honored or disturbed that he replied to me twice?
Fortunately I did not get notifications about it and feel compelled to argue with him because they were from before I made an IntenseDebate account. But wow.
“Also I’m pretty sure Sartre was a virgin until he got with the hot triplets.”
The Toast was one of the first sites I whitelisted after installing Ghostery. I am thrilled to look at ads that support a site that respects my privacy, but being tracked freaks me out, and the Newspeak “explanations” of how it “optimizes” my “experience” freak me out even more.
THIS. Which of these objects should I permit on The Toast? Do explain what each one does and how I can retain control over my own data with regard to each:
Alexa Metrics (analytics)
DoubleClick (advertising)
Facebook Social Graph (widgets)
Google Analytics (analytics)
Gravatar (widgets)
Twitter Badge (widgets, social)
Twitter Button (widgets, social)
DoubleClick is Google’s advertising service. Google Analytics is pretty self-explanatory; it lets you know how many people visited the site, where they came from, how long they spent, etc. The Facebook and Twitter bits are basically just the buttons at the top left of an article that let you share it on social services. Gravatar serves up avatar pictures for IntenseDebate. Alexa offers metrics that let you more easily compare your site’s traffic to other similar sites – similar to GA, but GA doesn’t offer as much cross-site data and Alexa isn’t as specific about on-site metrics.
Honestly, as a developer who mostly works on the web, that’s a pretty bog-standard list, and I’m ok with most of them. Ghostery is registering 19 external scripts for me right now, most of which I can ID, but there are a few that concern me a bit.
Whatever algorithm they use, they assumed I was a dude because I was looking for wool face cowl things for winter. I am a woman and women also live in cold climates and run outside and like my nose as it is without it being frostbitten off, please stop advertising Axe body spray….
Also, here is a picture of my cat, his name is Tom Baker
OF COURSE IT IS
<3
That is some A+ catting.
Yeah, he is very good at being a cat.
Except that he will not sit in laps, no matter what. He will leap over two people rather than just walk across a lap.
Well, leaping is also an excellent cat activity, so maybe it balances out the absence of lap-sitting?
I was going to say literally the exact same thing.
This picture makes me wish even harder that I were a cat.
What a handsome fellow!
aaaah, the curled paws!
that snagglefang
what an *excellent* cat
I love cats having full names of famous people, my cat’s full name is Klaas-Jan Huntelaar
He is a good cat and a pretty cat.
This is an excellent cat belly!
What a lovely boy! If Tom Baker was a cat, he would be stocky, striped and mellow. I would not be able to resist knitting a cat-sized Dr. Who scarf, and taking a photo of catTomBaker wearing it.
this one is also constantly getting into trouble by sticking his nose in places
also fighting with our other cat, Leela.
So.
You named your other cat Leela!! <3
I knit myself all thirteen feet of the Doctor’s scarf three years ago. I am still very, very proud of that.
Fun fact: The Vale of Cashmere is now adjacent to a “natural playground” (read: child-filled mud pit; it’s awesome), so I imagine the vibe has changed somewhat in the past year, at least during daylight hours.
Dear Toasties, Genevieve Valentine wrote an essay for the AV Club that is highly relevant to your interests: Crimson Peak erects and subverts the gothic family tree.
<3 Genevieve Valentine, and that’s a great piece. Interestingly, the boy had assumed that Crimson Peak was about vampires.
That’s a great article. Also, in the comments, some dude says ‘The Doctor is the hero. The sister is the killer. Damsel in distress is distressed’ which distressed me because EDITH IS NOT JUST A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS YOU IDIOT, then someone says, no she’s the hero and original dude changes his mind and agrees! I’m always so shocked to see reasonable internet conversations outside of the Toast so that was nice.
Some of the AV Club comment sections are great, and some of them are terrible, and I’m never entirely sure which it’s going to be. Genevieve (who is a pal of mine) has had some pretty awful comments on past essays (mostly, as opposed to TV recaps), so I’m glad there were some actual good ones this time!
It was better before Disqus, and there is still a core of decent commenters, but now you can get waves of nasty posts coming in from the Great Wastes of the rest of the internet due to easy of cross posting Disqus accounts.
That one could have gone either way tbh. I was bracing myself for original dude to stand by his viewpoint in the face of the evidence because you know, women are for saving.
The AV Club’s review of the Welcome to Night Vale novel was literally 90% dudes whining how tumblr fandom (i.e. young women, let’s be honest) ruins everything. UGH.
This was such a fantastic article! I had to immediately post it to Facebook when I saw it, and then my friend and I had a super long, detailed discussion about the movie and its Gothic elements. Overanalyzing movies is my favorite thing, so this article basically made my entire weekend.
I just opened the link and saw the article starts with a quote from Dracula’s Daughter. I love it already. A+.
ETA It gets so much better. Dragonwyck (which I watched right before going to see Crimson Peak) and that picture from The Innocents and the Addams family motto sneakily worked in there and clearly I have to watch The Spiral Staircase now and can everything just be long, well-thought out pieces on gothics from now on please?
Also for Halloween in suburbia this year we took the glass out of the outward-opening screen door and it made giving out candy 100% easier, A+ idea stolen from neighbor, definitely recommend it.
Yes! We unhooked the spring that keeps the outer door from slamming open against the house and propped it open with a chair. Highly recommended.
Ooh, we propped ours open with a skeleton! Easy way to show we were “open for business”.
I’m not convinced a film where a powerful fairy turns a child, and everyone who lives with the kid, into a beast (curable by love of course. Fairy curses seem prone to weakness in the face of love – it’s something they should look into perhaps) should be put into actual historical timelines.
Fairy curses are prone to weakness in the face of love because human love, which is necessarily possible only in the face of human mortality, is fundamentally incomprehensible to eternal beings.
“Gee this 13 year old who apparently lives without his parents and also for some reason is answering his own door despite having hundreds of servants sure is unreasonably cranky! I know! A curse!”
Why do none of these articles include a link to where I can buy one of these horse embezzlement trophies? What better boost for the days when you’re feeling down than to rub a token that represents self-aggrandizement, horses, using law enforcement on white collar crime and government corruption, and the fickleness of currency and value that allowed me to pick it up for ten bucks?
“What is that trophy for?”
“It indicates a time when civilization succeeded.”
Bad news: it looks like they are being auctioned as a single lot, with buyer solely responsible for clearing them out of the warehouse in Illinois in the winter. Maybe the buyer will resell them, who knows.
Good news: the pdf describing the sale does included a few more pictures. Which, oof. http://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2015/trophies-se…
“31 Wisconsin-shaped trophies”
that’s… a lot of Wisconsin-shaped trophies
One can never have enough Wisconsin-shaped trophies.
My two best friends and I independently turned up to the same Halloween party dressed as early 80s goths (kind of by accident though) (because none of us had been bothered to make a proper costume and just made do with what we had clothes-wise) (which turns out is kind of gothy) and it was so nice because now there are a ton of pictures of the three of us together, and we haven’t really had any group pics of us since uni.
Friends! On Friday’s Open Thread I bemoaned my post-interview anxiety, and you were very kind about it. And then yesterday… I got the job! I am THRILLED because this means that CONTRACT LIFE IS OVER and I get to have a permanent job where I can stay for many years. It also means I have to move clear across the country at the end of December, which is terrifying, but let’s focus on the fact that I got the job! I also negotiated my salary a bit higher so I feel like a total boss.
Anyway, thanks for the encouragement and the talking-down-off-the-anxiety-ledge, Toasties. I love you.
Congratulations!
CONGRATULATIONS!
Moving across the country sounds terrifying, but a permanent job, negotiating for more money, all awesome things!
Guys, I had an almost completely shitty weekend and Halloween was pretty much a bust and I hate my job and the only things that will get me through this week are the all of you and the prospect of there only being five sleeps until two weeks of honeymoon, so please bear with me if I am slightly twitchy and tetchy this week ILU all.
Uuuugh that sucks but hey honeymoon! Where you going??
San Francisco for two days, Napa for a day, and Monterey/Carmel for ten days. We’ve got reservations at Chez Panisse and Bourbon&Branch already. There is going to be a lot of food and a lot of stinky sea lions and a lot of wine and it is going to be amazing. The thought of the new baby loggerhead turtle at the Monterey Bay Aquarium is sustaining me right now.
That sounds like an A+ honeymoon! Monterrey is one of favorite places and I’m waaay jealous.
I know these feels! My w/e was a complete horrid mess (up until watching movies last night) and so may I offer you a virtual hug of commiseration?
You certainly may, and please accept one in return.
You have my sympathy, and as I’m currently crashing in Sonoma County I will be waving in your general direction as you pass semi-close by. Hang in there!
Thanks for linking to the Guardian piece about the lack of abortion access in Ireland and Northern Ireland. It has felt like an uphill struggle for so long, trying to get our rights (not helped when the majority of politicians refuse to engage with the issue, to the extent that the leader of the main opposition party in Ireland recently said they weren’t going to ‘even go there’ if they gain power in the next election) but since marriage equality came in there’s been a slow but steady uptick in abortion rights activism being taken seriously, personal stories being shared, public figures coming out in favour of reform and public rejection of anti-choice lies. It’s very encouraging.
I live in the UK now but I was at the protests for Miss D back in 2007. Good God it is so depressing. Fingers crossed #repealthe8tH happens.
The ad-blocker thing was interesting. I saw Nicole talking about it on Twitter and I had a lot of thoughts. I do use an ad-blocker, although it’s off for the Toast after the redesign. I guess my big issue with this is that it comes down to what the actual cost of things is. And I know that micropayments and paywalls don’t work (or at least, they don’t work in the sense that people refuse to pay, which seems to indicate that the market is working, in the die-hard capitalist sense of things), but the market is indicating that when people know how much data is being collected about them behind the scenes, they object to that data collection (the massive uptake in ad-blockers, and especially the way that, on sites where the audience has more knowledge of how much and what kinds of data is collected, the dramatic percentage increase in blocking).
And when people find out how much things actually cost (and not just on the web; you’re starting to see this with stuff like no-tipping restaurants that have to adjust prices to reflect reality, and if anyone ever kills or substantially reduces farm subsidies, the dramatic increase in the price of corn and meat is going to make for some massive changes), they indicate that they don’t actually value those things as much. I think it’s generally preferable to live in a world where we know what we’re involved in, as much as possible. I don’t know what to do about this specific issue though, because I do value the Toast at $60 a year – that’s really not that much, given the amount of time I spend on here. But I’m also coming from a privileged position and I know that, if the Toast went completely pay-walled, it would probably die.
I feel like some compromise might exist in the form of content-blocking for people who use ad-blockers, with the opportunity to donate a set amount and then view the content (which would be fair), but that’s a ton of extra infrastructure and I sorta suspect the reason that’s not already happening is because when they run the numbers, they suggest people would just stop viewing the site. I just don’t know what the middle ground is, or even if there’s a middle ground at this point. Stuff like clearly denoted sponsored content might work; Daring Fireball does that, and it works well for him, but it probably wouldn’t work as well for other people. I also think the window for a compromise on advertising and payments was a few years ago, before a site like the Verge, which is basically text and pictures and a few videos (i.e. what shouldn’t be a “big” website) ballooned out to 7 mb per page load, and before rate-limited mobile devices had eaten so much of web traffic. People are angry about ads now in a way that I don’t remember even just a few years ago.
I don’t know! I have all these thoughts, but no conclusions.
Yeah – I don’t mind ads showing up on websites along the sides – the way the Toast has them is totally fine to me from a visual/site-use perspective. I HATE ad overlays, and anything that autoplays. I also am really wary of data collection (I have everything set to browse incognito, which I’m not sure really helps?).
I guess my overall feelings are: I don’t mind seeing ads that don’t substantially detract from the ability to read/navigate the site; if I pay for a subscription, then I don’t want to see ads at all; regardless, I don’t want ads tailored to my “interests” because that is creepy af; and if I’m honest, I’ve never once clicked on an ad to learn more or purchase anything, so I’m not sure how useful they are for advertisers anyway, but maybe I’m an outlier?
“and if I’m honest, I’ve never once clicked on an ad to learn more or purchase anything, so I’m not sure how useful they are for advertisers anyway, ”
Me neither, except by accident when I’ve clicked with my wrist or the cat’s walked over the laptop or something. I don’t know anyone who ever buys anything from ads on sites!
Friends just announced that they’re expecting by using the facebook widget, and my very first thought was “do they WANT to see nothing but ads for diapers and formula for the next year?” I feel like a lot of people truly have no idea. On the one hand, I’ll be quite happy if I never get another viagra spam e-mail or ad for a dating site featuring porny images ever again, the the data collection angle is really creeping me out.
Amusingly enough, one of my most hippie friends just took a job with a firm that specializes in big data analysis for ad targeting. I can understand why – intellectually it’s a fascinating challenge – but I do wonder, in the end, if it works.
See, I’m a little different, because I actually do appreciate well-targeted ads. Google’s search results ads are frequently exactly what I’m looking for. The Deck, an advertising network used by some sites (notably Metafilter and Marco Arment), is really good about showing me ads for things I might use, and I’ve clicked on their ads a couple of times. If I have to view some advertisements, I’d rather they be for something I might use someday.
Agree with this! I don’t mind the Toast ads at all – I’m a marketer and not really weirded out at all by the idea of data collection for more targeted ads (I mostly just get annoyed when the ads fail at being well targeted – like, obviously I don’t want to see a Chris Brown ad on YouTube, I visit feminist sites for fuck’s sake). But I HATE the ones that cause a bad UX. Overlays (worse when they have the x to close them in a weird place so it takes a second to find it, also worse when they have a passive aggressive message so you’re clicking on a line that says something like “I hate good deals” in order to close the window). And auto plays. And anything that blocks the text on the page. Or just a bad design so the page looks cluttered.
Anyway, for my part, as long as the Toast keeps the design good and sticks with ads that don’t ruin the experience of the site, I got no issues with seeing the ads. But I will also donate because for the amount of time I spend on this site it’s probably overdue.
Oh my god, I hate those “I hate good deals” links so much. It’s irrational, but I have closed tabs rather than click that link.
I think it’s perfectly rational to navigate away from a site because they do something that makes the experience bad. They keep doing this stuff cause it works, even though people hate it.
See, I like them because I take a sick joy in saying ‘yes, I do hate good deals, SO THERE’
I hate overlays so much. They are usually the last thing to load on the site and the x is the last thing to load from that. I’m often in areas with really slow internet connections so what usually happens is I’ve started reading the page, then have to stop and wait for a while for the damn thing to load just so I can close it. And sometimes the x never loads properly so I have to give up on reading that site! Last night the x never loaded for a site I was looking at on my phone and the ad covered literally 50% of the text on the screen!
Oh man, I visited a nutrition site the other day, and one of those pop-ups shilling their book had a passive-aggressive yes/no like that; the no option was “I don’t care about my weight”.
Reader, I married it.
Would marry
“so you’re clicking on a line that says something like ‘I hate good deals'”
I’ve never seen anything like this before, but I say KILL IT WITH FIRE.
Cosmopolitan.com has the best/worst of those!! I clicked over there to find an example and the first one was: “Nope, I don’t like hot men or cute cats.”
It’s always funny to me when I see an ad for something I HAVE ALREADY BOUGHT. Like, yes, that is relevant to my interests, targeted ad, that’s why I bought it. I am not buying it again.
I also really hate overlays, pop-ups, etc. Lots of sites seem to do that with their “join our mailing list” stuff too. I just wanna read this one article someone linked on Twitter, if I like it I will come back to your site!
I see a lot of ads for stuff I’ve already bought, the university where I got my master’s, and a company I used to work for. In a sense it’s very well targeted, but so often the ads are trailing a step behind me!
Oof. I’ve gotten ads for things I wanted to buy that were out of stock. Like they’re taunting me.
I think 90% of the ads I see on Facebook are for things I’ve already bought, or products I’ve looked at while researching the things I’ve bought and then decided against buying. Like, advertisers must really suck at advertising if they can only show me ads for things I want *after* the fact.
What I find even more infuriating is when it’s a big-ticket item I’ve already bought. Yes, I just bought a dishwasher–which means that I really shouldn’t need another for a good 15 years! How about trying to sell me dishwasher soap? Because now you have a good clue that I’m going to be in the market for that for quite a while!
I’m somewhat entertained by how bad Amazon is at this. They have more data on people’s buying patterns than probably any company in the world, but they’re so hilariously bad at turning that into useful suggestions for what to buy next. And I realize that the algorithms that do that kind of predictive work are really, really tough, but it baffles me that Amazon is still this terrible at saying “You bought X, therefore you are likely to want Y.”
Even worse–my sister-in-law used to work for the company that does Amazon’s recommendations. And I just never had the courage to ask her why they were so terrible. I do know, from her, that this was originally an in-house Amazon unit that then spun off into doing recommendations for other companies, and I strongly suspect that they started from an approach of “if you liked this book/movie/cd, you’ll want to know about that creator’s other work” and then never really got it that buying another book by an author is not the same thing as buying another dishwasher from a manufacturer.
Leslie Ellen Jones, PhD
Jack of All Trades and Doctor of Folklore
[email protected]
The Center for the Study of Real Interesting Stuff: <a href=”https://leslieellenjones.wordpress.com
https://leslieellenjones.wordpress.com<br />”Truth is an odd number” — Flann O’Brien
Haha yeah! They’re like, “You bought a mouth guard last week. Treat yourself and buy a new one!”
Same! I tend to window-shop on certain sites fairly regularly, so basically all the ads I see are for sites I already visit, which does not seem to be the most sensible targeting in the world.
I wish there was a way they could stop those “join our mailing list/like us on social media” popups once you’ve already done that. I liked the Hairpin on Facebook five years ago, I don’t need that popup every time!
Right, like… I feel if information is being creepily collected about me, at least they could do it COMPREHENSIVELY and in a way that makes it less annoying for me to navigate the internet.
Yeah I’m pretty highly allergic to advertising anyway, and I can’t fathom ever clicking an ad to go buy something. I like to do my own research when it’s warranted, and if not then I just go buy the thing I want?
I don’t know if I’d mind ads tailored to my interests if they were better at it. I’ve clicked on links a few times and often found the site advertising doesn’t even ship to Canada (where I am)! How is that remotely useful for anyone!
I do enjoy the ads I get on my work computer, though, because my work-related internet usage seems to confuse them. I previously did a lot of work with diamond and gold mines, so used to get almost wall-to-wall engagement ring ads, and now I work with a group opposing a lot of the oil and gas industrial proposals in my area and I now get a lot of pro-pipeline ads. Good try, analytics companies, but not quite!
I’ve had a real uptick in ads for vinyl sheet piles lately (which was a project decision made months ago, and not by me). Not sure who those ads are targeted to- is that really a decision made by internet ad? I feel like it is not…
I love hilariously random suggestions like that.
I got an offer once for an “expert manslaughter lawyer” (what on earth did they think I’ve been up to??), and a friend of mine got one for “used industrial robots”. She was like, “Come on, I would at least spring for a *new* industrial robot”.
Okcupid (of all places to use for an example) has this feature where, if you have adblocker on, the section where their ads would go has a message saying “hey we noticed you’re using an adblocker and that’s fine, but please consider either donating or whitelisting us, etc etc”, and I think that could work here. it’s not as annoying as a message popping up over the site (and by that I mean like an overlay/pop-up you have to click to close to see The Toast), and it wouldn’t stop people from coming here, the way making it subscription-only might, too.
Yeah, I’ve seen those on a bunch of places, but I’m skeptical about appealing to people’s better angels on any site that doesn’t have a community like this one (which is basically…the Toast, Metafilter, some of the time, when the topic isn’t race, and TNC’s Golden Horde from 2009-2012).
I still refuse to remove ad-blocking anywhere… it’s still a massive potential vector for malware. I’m very glad to see what the equivalent cost to keep things running here is though, and fortunate that I’ll be able to pay that each year.
That’s my main issue, too. I’m glad they gave a suggested amount to donate– I was wondering what would be appropriate, and I now I can send some funds their way and feel less guilty!
I mean, there’s a lot of stuff going on with the whole advertising thing. A big part of it is that the ad model just…doesn’t really work for monetization all that well? But I don’t really know what model will. The internet has basically fragmented the audience so much that’s it’s pretty difficult to make money.
If the internet had STARTED with subscription based models for sites that might work, but it didn’t and that ship has pretty much sailed. A lot of people have started turning towards a patron system with things like Patreon, but it’s a TON of work, doesn’t always pan out, income is not guaranteed, and often feels like a popularity contest to me.
Yeah Patreon is interesting, I contribute to a few. But it feels like to get any patrons you need to provide bonus exclusive content to them, at least at the higher tiers. And that is a lot more work.
I’m trying to run one right now and I know for a fact it is. And when your Patreon is for a site, rather than something tangible like a game or music or what-have-you, it’s a lot harder to come up with stuff because like, there isn’t a lot of interesting behind the scenes stuff that goes on!
I sometimes feel like I’m in the strong minority, in that 1. I don’t care that data companies see which websites I go to, so they know I like yoga pants and American Girl dolls, who cares?!, and 2. I have clicked on ads and bought things! Or just seriously considered it. (Clothes, shoes, yarn: I’m a sucker.)
Vaguely related to Beauty & the Beast, but I was skipping from video to video on Youtube yesterday and somehow ended up watching the “Gaston” song from the movie – and Gaston looked NOTHING like I remembered!! I guess I haven’t actually seen the movie in a long time, just listened to the songs by themselves… I kept being wigged out by his face in particular, I didn’t remember him having such a long, thin chin?!
My tentative theory is that I haven’t really seen the actual cartoon Gaston in a long time, but I’ve seen a few of those viral photos/videos of guys who play Gaston at the Disney parks, and they must have totally different face shapes… it was so weird!
Apparently they had a lot of trouble designing him, because he’s supposed to be attractive and ALSO a villain.
http://turbomun.tumblr.com/post/80012362197/samef…
Andreas Deja…was assigned Gaston, the bluff, vain bully of Beauty and the Beast. His first efforts were rejected by Jeffrey Katzenberg.
“No, no, he’s not handsome enough,” said the production boss.
“But he’s a villain,” Deja replied. “Can’t we just juice him up?”
Source: “Disney’s Art of Animation: From Mickey Mouse to Beauty and the Beast,” by Bob Thomas (Hyperion, 1991)
Mother Gothel, in addition to being maaaybe a size 8, also looks Jewish to me. Or maybe Romani.
I do 90% of my Toast reading via my phone, and I never see any ads, which is starting to concern me.
I don’t have ad blocker installed, I still see the ads on other sites, and it’s a bit weird that the ads don’t load on the Toast.
Same! Anyone know what the deal is?
Are you in the US?
I’m in Australia and I see many fewer ads. Idk about mobile, I don’t read the toast on mobile much.
In re: the abortion article (holy balls that situation SUCKS):
Distance between Belfast and Liverpool: 145 miles.
Distance between Lubbock, TX (as well as most of the rest of North Texas) and its four nearest abortion clinics: 279 miles, if the Supreme Court rejects /Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole/.
Ugh, I think both those situations suck about the same, since unlike in Texas, there’s a body of water between Belfast and Liverpool.
It’s bloody awful that women in many parts of the US have their reproductive rights curtailed as much as, if not more than (in terms of expense, distance required to travel) women in Ireland do.
In Ye Olde NYC news, I had to hunt down and watch Love at First Bite with my mother. Cue ALL the stories about early eighties New York from both parents. (Naughty catholic schoolgirl from CT mom and USMA dad who’d go clubbing in his cadet greys.) Only thirty odd years distance can make a near post-apocalyptic cityscape seem romantic.
My favorite trick-or-treater was a 3 year old dressed as a blue monster who clearly had this whole thing figured out. As soon as I opened the door he didn’t say a single word, but reached up and took hold of the candy bowl and tried to pull it down to his level. His dad was horrified but I couldn’t stop laughing and he got a huge handful of candy.
And now I’m avoiding my racist neighbor for the next week so I can avoid hearing him complain about kids coming to the neighborhood “who clearly don’t live here” because of their insidious plot to…get candy? On Halloween? Who gives a shit?
Ughhhh my coworker was…it was hard to tell if he was complaining about or just discussing the phenomenon of kids coming from a poorer nearby neighborhood to get candy from the wealthier suburb he lives in, but it set my dogwhistle alert off something fierce. You’re a senior dev! You could afford to buy fifty boxes of full-size Kitkats!
Prudie had a letter from a person complaining about children from a poorer neighborhood coming over to their neighborhood for trick or treating at some point, and while I have serious problems with Prudie, I absolutely loved how she ridiculed and shamed that person.
This is one of those things where the jerk radar pings so fast so hard, because there are just so many valid alternatives to complaining about this. Be someone who isn’t home on halloween! Complain about economic segregation in housing patterns and how it acts as a barrier to social mobility! Be happy about having more costumes to coo over!
Anything but complain about how sometimes kids like to eat candy.
I think it’s more like complaining about how those kids like to eat candy.
let me tell you, as a kid who went to the fancy neighborhood *just once* to see what it was like: those schmancy-pants McMansion dwellers hand out almost exclusively tootsie rolls.
We got exactly two trick-or-treaters this year in our little suburban paradise. It was so sad. My husband thinks it’s because we live on a main road. I guess *we’re* the bad neighborhood now.
I think I may have had 9. Although it could’ve just been 7. Less than last year, to be sure. All of the houses immediately around me had their porch lights off, which may have contributed, but it may just be that all the kids were at the mall. :/
The discussion of kids from poor or dangerous neighborhoods being driven into other neighborhoods briefly came up among my family over the weekend, and aside from a somewhat patronizing tone and a few minor problematic assumptions, I was happy that the general conclusion was, “What kind of a monster gets mad at people (esp. kids) for wanting to have a safe and fun Trick-or-Treat experience and actually getting some candy?!”
My boss was complaining about Halloween last week. “Strange children knock on my door and I’m supposed to spend my own money to provide them with food?” I get it, though. She has to pinch every penny of her 6-figure salary in order to afford her 2 yearly cruises.
eat the rich eat the rich EAT THE RICH (i know lots of perfectly nice wealthy people who donate a ton of money and are good folks but good lord the cluelessness in the world is staggering sometimes)
Did he write that horrible letter to Dear Prudence???
I live in a not great neighbourhood (that’s rapidly gentrifying) that’s close to a really bad neighbourhood. I know a lot of my trick-or-treaters were coming from that neighbourhood. Only a monster would begrudge these kids a chance to get candy (something they probably can’t routinely afford) safely. Sure their costumes were kind of haphazardly flung together from dollar store stuff. I didn’t care. We also got a neighbour kid dressed as some kind of anime ninja who wished us “a super mythical magical awesome afternoon!” It was the first year we’d been home to hand out candy in a couple of years. We plan to do something very elaborate next year, including offering coffee and Baileys for the adults.
We had some trick-or-treaters who had no costume whatsoever, and I was glad to see that on our street nobody blinked an eye. When an eight year old shows up on your doorstep on Halloween you give them candy, period. We offered some to the parents too, lots of them took us up on it!
The kids from Hocus Pocus reunited and posted an instagram photo and it’s freaking me out, mostly because the “Max” is unrecognizable, and had I not been informed it was him, I never would have known.
Woah. Was not expecting him to look like that.
He looks nothing like he did then and it’s confusing. I kept looking back and forth at the pictures for a good five minutes and I still can’t see it tbh.
Aw, where’s Jason Marsden? Ultimate 90s reunion there, Hocus Pocus and Eerie Indiana.
We saved a couple handfuls of candy from last weekend’s toddler party (full of chaos, no fatalities!), hoping for a few trick-or-treaters – it was our first year in this house with a weekend Halloween, so we were there during daylight, which is maybe when people are trick-or-treating? I set a pumpkin outside the front door while we were downstairs eating dinner, to signify that we were, indeed, celebrating Halloween. No one knocked in the 45 minutes or so we were within range of the door, but someone did steal the pumpkin. I wish they’d knocked and asked, I would have given them up to six pumpkins and also some candy. Oh well.
Aw, that’s disheartening. People suck. :/
I was surprised to not get any trick-or-treaters in a neighborhood that definitely has lots of kids until my friend asked if I turned on my porch light and I was like “um, guess I didn’t think about that.” whomp whomp
Got lots of candy now though.
I went to a friend’s house to hang out and help hand out candy, and she decorated her yard from here to the moon and back since it was her first Halloween in a house with a neighborhood and she was so excited to hand out candy to the kids. Yet, somehow, despite being a neighborhood that looks like a stock photo of the concept of suburbia, despite a yard with literally half a dozen jack-o-lanterns plus a ghost in the trees plus a graveyard plus a well-lit front walk lined with glowing multicolored skulls plus an open front door, despite literally being on the same street as an elementary school, we got maaaaaybe seven kids all night.
There is so much candy left over now.
I live in a low-rise apartment building, and so kids don’t generally come in, but this year I actually made the effort to sit outside the front door and hand out candy. And my neighbour did, too. We got twenty-seven trick-or-treaters, which I think was pretty good.
Also, I learned that October 31 is not a good day to try to buy a pumpkin.
Also, October 30 is not a great day to try and buy glowsticks.
Funny you should mention Sartre…
This is the rallying cry of mansplainers and male internet commenters the world over!!
I’m glad so many people want to talk about the deleted comments. So, I have to ask: Does anyone else think ‘Gaston’ lends itself very easily to a queer reading? Because at this point, it sounds to me like the most lightly coded song in the world. Thoughts?
It’s also ten times more amusing if you picture Vladimir Putin going around singing it to himself. It is the perfect song for that shirtlessrobotman and nothing will convince me otherwise.
I always got a kind of unrequited-sexual-obsession vibe from Gaston’s little friend.
Thank you so much for publishing those deleted comments. They are endlessly fascinating and entertaining 🙂
Does The Toast still lose revenue if adblockers (I use AdBlock+) are disabled on the site? I disable it on all the websites I visit regularly (except Facebook), but if its still cutting into your revenue, I’d gladly help out.
On a related note, do you get anything if we click on ads?
I’m not positive, but I think as long as your web browser loads the ad and you see it, the website gets their revenue. Shouldn’t matter if you’re blocking ads on other sites.
If you’ve disabled the blocker, then the revenue will count – it’s (almost always) based on unique user’s eyeballs hitting the ad, not clicks on the ad.
I know I’ve mentioned this in the Toast comments before, but I’m still annoyed about the time I had to argue with a friend over whether she should be allowed to pick her nose in my car.
I am an extremely non-confrontational person, but after a previous incident in which I saw her pick her nose out of the corner of my eye when she was sitting next to me on the couch and then didn’t seem to understand why I didn’t want to let her use my laptop keyboard, I’d had enough.
ADULTS SHOULD NOT HAVE TO BE TOLD NOT TO PICK THEIR NOSES AROUND OTHERS. WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY.
Pick your nose while sitting on the toilet like a goddamn civilized adult!
Sometimes I go through the Thatz Not Okay archives just to ease my rage at the world and its stubborn lack of consideration for civilization.
http://gawker.com/tag/thatz-not-okay
So a confession – I have adblock installed, but Nicole’s tweets motivated me to finally get around to whitelisting the Toast. Unfortunately, I cannot figure out how to do so. I’ve entered the url of the Toast into the filter list several times, and still no ads. Anyone more tech-savvy than me have any idea why that might be the case?
What adblocker are you using? For instance, with AdBlock, you should see a stop sign normally next to the address bar, where it shows you how many ads are being blocked per site?
If that’s the one you have, then click that sign and select “Don’t run on pages on this domain.”
Cheers! Apparently I’d managed to disable adblock for the Toast already – but I’m not seeing any ads – which may be a testament to the redesign or I’ve done something wrong elsewhere.
It wasn’t working for me either. I actually tried the “Don’t run” option you mentioned, reloaded the page, and there still didn’t seem to be any ads. I had to go into the extension options, click the “Customize” menu, and then click “Show ads on a webpage or domain” and enter “www.the-toast.net” to get them to appear again.
If redheadedwolf’s approach doesn’t work for you, try that and see if it helps.
If you have AdBlock installed as a chrome extension, you don’t need to manually type in the url to whitelist it.
At the top right of the browser, next to the address bar, there is a little red stop sign with a number indicating the number of ads that have been blocked on that site. While you are at the-toast.net, you can just click on that little red stop sign, and you’ll get the option “Don’t run on pages on this domain,” and then you’ll get a confirmation window that says “exclude” or “cancel.”
I found this a bit confusing, but click the “exclude” button. This will exclude the toast from the list of sites on which Adblock is run. After that, you should have a green stop sign next to the address bar whenever you are at the toast.
I assume the process is similar for firefox, but if for whatever reason you do need to manually edit your filter, the syntanx for whitelisting the toast is:
@@||the-toast.net/$document
the @@ means “exclude the following address from the list of things I block ads from.”
the || means “apply this rule to all normal beginning variations of the following url (e.g. http://, https://, http://www., or none of the above)”
the the-toast.net/$document means “apply this rule to all pages in the the-toast.net domain.”
hope this helps!
The Northern Ireland assembly actually voted in equal marriage today – a historic first!
…then it immediately got vetoed by the biggest party in the assembly (the Christian fundamentalist and extremely right wing Democratic Unionist Party) in an abuse of a process designed to prevent sectarian abuses of one community by the other.
Baby steps, people. Baby steps.
We had a successful spooky board game night! Mysterium was a big hit, it’s a really fun and challenging game. Was also played some zombie dice which was a good ‘downtime’ game, and got a round of Betrayal in (of course the one person new to the game was the traitor).
Why does that always happen in Betrayal? I’ve played a gazillion times and I never get to be the traitor, but every time I’m playing with someone new, THEY get to be the traitor. Hmph.
Right? It’s funny as there is someone in our group who wants to be the traitor SO BADLY but it never happens, it almost always falls to me!
I’ve always browsed with AdBlock on The Toast, simply because any time I tried without it, I ended up accidentally clicking on ads when the page suddenly shifted, and would get super frustrated and leave.
I tried donating monthly, but got a bit freaked out when the receipts were still coming back saying “Nick Pavich,” so I had to cancel that donation.
Since the beautiful and functional redesign, I’ve whitelisted The Toast and am happy to be again contributing to the bottom line!
A little off topic, but I just wanted everyone to know that last night I experienced my very first earthquake! There were three of them last night in the Black Canyon City area (I’m in north-ish Phoenix) and I think I felt the second one! It was a 4.1 which is pretty sizable for Arizona. It really just felt like a large truck was driving outside my house, which is what I thought it was at first. But it was 11:30 at night and the shaking went on for longer than expected, plus it sounded really weird, so I was like ‘?????’. So I checked Facebook and Twitter, and turns out it was an earthquake! I then ran to my parents room to wake them up and tell them, and they were like”‘ok that’s nice dear” *snoring*. My aunt lives in Black Canyon City, and it apparently woke her up because she messaged me on Facebook to ask if I had felt the quake.
MY FIRST EARTHQUAKE! MY VERY FIRST EARTHQUAKE! I AM SO HAPPY I WAS AWAKE AND ALERT AND I FELT IT! Toasties, you don’t understand how happy I am about this. I’ve never experienced any natural disasters other than wildfires (one time there was a fire two miles from a camp I was counseling for, we almost had to evacuate 150+ children hahaha nbd) so this is very exciting for me.
Yay! I’m glad your first earthquake was a successful and safe experience! Now remember- some people get so blasé about earthquakes they begin to seek out more and more dangerous earthquake experiences- moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, keeping things on a shelf over their bed, and having top-heavy unsecured bookshelves. It’s better not to get into those sorts of self destructive habits. With the right attitude you can have just as much fun with a 4.1 as with a 6.0!
(I’m actually really glad you weren’t freaked out by the earthquake; I just wanted the opportunity to be silly. My first earthquake was Loma Preata and it kind of ruined them for me so I sort of fell in love with the idea of someone who likes them as long as no one gets hurt.)
Oh my god, the Loma Prieta as your first earthquake experience? That’s terrifying! Yeah I can understand why that turned you off earthquakes.
I’m glad no one was hurt in this one (not that it was really big enough to anything other than rattle some dishes and some nerves but still). Maybe some people sprained a thumb or something trying to tweet about the quake, but other than that nothing catastrophic. 9/10 earthquake experience, would highly recommend.
i was VERY UNAMUSED. the second it happened i texted my parnter and was all, “how soon is too soon to pack my survival gear in the car and flee?”. UNAMUSED!!!
all this talk about ad blockers has made me retroactively glad that i don’t know how to use them and never learned. i’ll continue gleefully not knowing. that said, i’ve decided to contribute monthly, the same amount that my ex pays me for boarding his cat. this seems like the correct way to spend that money.
For safety’s sake, on the general web, you probably should be using an ad-blocker. Malicious ads can inject malware on your machine.
1: I have whitelisted the Toast since the redesign and it’s great.
2: I posted this is the open thread, but it’s so delightful I have to share it again. Look at these ladies from 1875 who are dressed as witches!
I LOVE the lady who couldn’t find a broom of her own and thought “fuck it, a duster and pan is pretty much the same thing.”
“It’s a mini broom. With feathers.”
Look at all these women directors who Hollywood isn’t hiring for stuff. LOOK AT IT.
http://www.vulture.com/2015/10/100-women-director…
“Women have directed 12 Best Picture nominees, but only three of them have come with a concurrent nod for Best Director. ”
ugh
ughhhhhhhh
Toasties – is Edith really back at The Hairpin?!?!
A THOUSAND TINY SCREAMS!
Yesssss!!! I never check the Hairpin anymore and I miss it. Thanks for mentioning, otherwise I wouldn’t have known!
I read the abortion piece at the weekend, and it made me so sad and angry; the situation is so appalling (potential life sentence in Northern Ireland!). I have donated to the Abortion Support Network in the past, and will continue to do so, but it’s so shit that an organisation like that even needs to exist. As the article made very clear, abortion and and has always been a class issue – if you have the money, you’re probably going to be able to get a safe abortion. If not, you’re screwed.
toasties
I’m coming off a bad week, a fevered-sick-but-mom-always-must-function weekend, and right into PMDD very very bad thoughts. I know how to handle them but I’m still sitting here and what I thought was going to be a day off of work to recover/sleep is trying to turn into a day of obsessive self-criticism and despair. I hate hormones, it hurts to eat, it’s beautiful out but my stupid brain is telling me that if I told the work I was sick I don’t deserve to go outside….Please just send mojo. And maybe a new brain.
I keep trying to send brains in the mail, but the USPS is all “meh meh meh, you can’t send human organs in an unpadded box, meh!” Hope you feel better soon.
Aww, I’m sorry! Will it help trick your brain if I pretend to be an authority figure and tell it that going outside will make you feel better, which will make you not have to tell work you’re sick again tomorrow?
Yes, sunlight has many healthful properties!
That deleted comment is really bugging me because he’s so very, very close to being pretty ideal Toast commenter- fixation on unimportant characters in a children’s film from over 20 years ago? Worrying about the intrusion of reality on fairy tale story? Annoyance with inaccuracy of small-town information flow and geography in same? This is all prime Toast stuff. BUT who the hell cares if the girls are virgins or not?! And how would it not count if Gaston toyed with their feelings even without sleeping with them? And, well, mentions of Sartre that take him even the teeniest bit seriously? Those are not okay. Just very upsetting.
Exactly! Creeps gonna creep but this guy had so much potential.
Also, I really wonder how a guy so clearly obsessed with these characters took SIX MONTHS to find the post. Does he not have Google alerts?
Also also, my favorite thing about deleted commenters is picturing them rage-spluttering, unnoticed, as they try to defend themselves from our mockery, like man-moths beating against a windowpane. The poor dears, they keep clicking Submit and nothing happens.
when I think about all the comments I’ve deleted unposted out of the firm knowledge that no one could ever care about my stupid thoughts and compare those to some of the deleted comments I just feel so silly.
I know! I totally agreed with him about Sartre being a philandering dirtbag, too.
Stayed in my room for Halloween as I do all day every day since things where I’m living have devolved. Was told I’d hear about the apartment I applied for no later than Thursday. Of course nobody called, so I checked in on Friday to find they’d gone with someone else. Spent the weekend tearfully rebooting and asking everyone I know for leads, then this morning got a chipper call from the realtor, which got my hopes up (the place is 90 fucking square feet, someone may well have opted to pass on it)…only to have them tell me I didn’t get it. Please join me in burning everything down. And then send housing leads.
My daughter dressed up as a wolf this year (wolf name: Howler) and while we were out I told her, “Slow down, wait for your cousin to catch up.”
Without breaking stride, she says, “Dad, as a wolf, I don’t wait for anyone” and marches on ahead of us.
Can’t argue with that logic.
nurture your little she-wolf. she has much potential.
argh I think I lost my cell phone. wah. I’ve never actually lost one (as opposed to “misplaced in house or office”) before. And it’s the same time I had to buy a new charger for my laptop and I think my beloved ipad is dying, and ugh this is going to be such a time and money and energy suck. /totally self-indulgent whine.
For Halloween I was dressed as Black Widow (because of COURSE I was) and midday a tiny Captain America and a tiny Hawkeye came to my door and they were SO EXCITED to see me.
“ARE YOU BLACK WIDOW?!?! WE WORK WITH YOU!!!!” and in that instance, my entire October was made. I gave them extra Avengers lollipops for that.
That is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard. I bet you made their day!
They were chattering excitedly to their parents as they walked away. “Ma! Ma! Did you see? Did you SEE? BLACK WIDOW gave us candy!”
/sob sob sob
best day.
Just emailed you!