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The pets have been on the bed at the same time. Let there be rejoicing.


The Guardian analyzed 70 million reader comments and the results are gratifying, if unsurprising, to those of us who do the work of moderation:

The Guardian was not the only news site to turn comments on, nor has it been the only one to find that some of what is written “below the line” is crude, bigoted or just vile. On all news sites where comments appear, too often things are said to journalists and other readers that would be unimaginable face to face – the Guardian is no exception.

New research into our own comment threads provides the first quantitative evidence for what female journalists have long suspected: that articles written by women attract more abuse and dismissive trolling than those written by men, regardless of what the article is about.

Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish.


KLAXONNNN new bio of Buffy Sainte-Marie:

IN THE EARLY 1960s in Wakefield, Massachusetts, an introverted, musically gifted outsider named Buffy Sainte-Marie was mustering the courage to try out for her high school’s majorette squad. As one of the only Native Americans students in her school, she found the mascot, the Wakefield Warrior — a red-eyed Indian chief with a cartoonishly menacing scowl — a little disquieting, though she couldn’t help but admire the intricate, kaleidoscopic headdresses the baton twirlers got to wear. She practiced her routine diligently. In the end, though, it wasn’t enough to make the cut; the Wakefield Majorettes — like so many other things, she’d find out later — appeared to be a meritocracy but when you got up close turned out to be a good old fashioned American popularity contest.


Rembert on the fuckin’ stupid De Blasio / Clinton attempt at joking:

I thought I wanted to save Bill, until I actually heard him say it, followed by the room releasing a collective “Oh no” sigh. To be clear, the sigh was not an “Oh shit, Bill went there — that’s my nigga Bill, he’s got the juice now.” It was definitely more along the lines of “God dammit, white people,” with a pinch of “Oh, so this is how y’all talk about us when we aren’t around.”


Gathering up the evidence of Assad’s war crimes:

The commission’s work recently culminated in a four-hundred-page legal brief that links the systematic torture and murder of tens of thousands of Syrians to a written policy approved by President Bashar al-Assad, coördinated among his security-intelligence agencies, and implemented by regime operatives, who reported the successes of their campaign to their superiors in Damascus. The brief narrates daily events in Syria through the eyes of Assad and his associates and their victims, and offers a record of state-sponsored torture that is almost unimaginable in its scope and its cruelty. Such acts had been reported by survivors in Syria before, but they had never been traced back to signed orders. Stephen Rapp, who led prosecution teams at the international criminal tribunals in Rwanda and Sierra Leone before serving for six years as the United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, told me that the CIJA’s documentation “is much richer than anything I’ve seen, and anything I’ve prosecuted in this area.”


I sorted r/relationships by “controversial” and “all time” and have been in a Reddit hole for days now, and this man is bottom of the barrel (people recognize his awfulness, bc r/relationships is really pretty decent in terms of readership):

For some background, we’ve been together for roughly 2 years, living together for a little over 1. We used to split all costs evenly (rent, utilities, gas, groceries whatever) until I got into a car accident around our 1 year mark. I was out of work for a few months and after my recovery it was too stressful to go back to work full time and I felt happier only working weekends. My girlfriend has always worked 40hrs + some overtime here and there because she loves her work. Now I still make enough to cover my share of rent, but that’s it. I feel like she resents me for it since she has to pay for everything else but she can afford it at this point and I can’t. I understand it’s difficult for her and I try to make up for it by sometimes bringing her things she likes like her favorite candy here and there and just little things I can.

And before anyone says ” Communication blah blah talk to her. I HAVE. And it’s the same thing every time. It’s mainly about chores and with the added resentment from our pay differences…It’s just an uphill battle.

I’ll admit I was spoiled growing up, I never had to do much but I grew up with my dad working to support the family while my mom took care of all cooking, cleaning, house up keep whatever. So it’s not that I don’t want to do them, it’s more of I CAN’T or if I do try something it’s done the wrong way. So I never really do chores on my own but the thing is if my girlfriend asks me to do something. I WILL. When I can. The problem is when she asks she wants thing done right then, and different things bother us. A pile of clothes on the floor doesn’t irk me. It could sit there for a week, whatever as long as I have clean underwear, I’ll get to laundry when I run out of my clothes. My girlfriend doesn’t like clothes to get behind, she doesn’t like clutter on tables.


DO NOT DO THIS:

I spent the first four months at that company doing a lot of learning on my own. My manager (let’s call her Betty) wasn’t very involved with my training at all, always claiming she had tons of work to do. Instead, she gave me lists of resources (training manuals, online certification classes, etc.) to go through, checked in with me maybe once a day, and assigned me a “starter project” so that I could “learn on the job.” So I basically taught myself everything I needed to learn, and the project I worked on was a huge success for the company. It launched about five months after I was hired. I got a raise out of it, and everyone in management seemed very happy with my work.

Once I had finished that project and the account I’d launched was doing well, I noticed some of the tactics/skills I’d used could be implemented on another account that wasn’t performing as well as the one I’d just launched.  I told Betty about my plan, and she completely blew me off. Basically she told me that she “already had plans” for this account, that she didn’t need my help, and instead assigned me to another (less important) project. Needless to say, I was more than a little insulted by her attitude.

But I know that sometimes you have to push hard to get things done. I calmed myself down, and waited until the next day when Betty left for a vacation, and I went to Betty’s boss (Veronica). I walked her through the improvements I wanted to make on this other account. I was given the green light to go ahead and start that work. Clearly this was the right thing to do! I mean, Veronica wouldn’t have given me the go-ahead otherwise, right?



this is interesting but oh man what if it happens:

At the White House, the level of service can be off-putting. The Obamas found it especially difficult, at first, to get used to a staff waiting on them hand and foot—they had, after all, only recently paid off their student loans. “If you drop something on the ground, it’s picked up before you know it,” White says. Trump, however, is used to an entourage and a high level of service, so he might be more comfortable, White says. A 10-year-old Barron Trump will be the same age as Malia Obama was when her father became president, and would likely want to be left alone, like Jenna and Barbara Bush and Chelsea Clinton before him. “They just want to be kids,” White says. Staffers say that Michelle Obama didn’t want her daughters to be able to call for butler service—if they want something out of the kitchen, she told them, then go to the kitchen yourself. It is unclear how Melania Trump would behave as First Lady, but on the campaign trail she often talks about taking care of their young son as her top priority.


meet the team whose job is to blur TV crotches:

At one desk, a 50-year-old man with gray hair and a gray goatee stared at a computer screen that displayed a fit man, completely naked, swinging from a rope, à la Tarzan. The clip played in a loop, over and over again.

At a nearby computer, a 43-year-old man scrolled through a spreadsheet, preparing for the day’s assignment.

“Boobs blur insufficient,” read one directive on the spreadsheet.

“More opaque crotch blur for him,” read another.


THE HUM:

The experience described by Steinborn and Taylor, and many others, is what’s come to be known as “the Hum,” a mysterious auditory phenomenon that, by some estimates, 2 percent of the population can hear. It’s not clear when the Hum first began, or when people started noticing it, but it started drawing media attention in the 1970s, in Bristol, England. After receiving several isolated reports, the British tabloid the Sunday Mirror asked, in 1977, “Have You Heard the Hum?” Hundreds of letters came flooding in. For the most part, the reports were consistent: a low, distant rumbling, like an idling diesel engine, mostly audible at night, mostly noticeable indoors. No obvious source.

The story of the Hum begins in such places, far from the hustle and bustle of cities, where stillness blankets everything. That’s where you hear it, and that’s where it becomes intolerable. After it was first reported in Bristol, it emerged in Taos, New Mexico; Kokomo, Indiana; Largs, Scotland. A small city newspaper would publish a report of a local person suffering from an unidentified noise, followed by a torrent of letters to the editor with similar complaints.


Every time a man gets pegged, an angel gets its wings:

I’m a bisexual man, and I had bottomed once before with a man. We’d been dating for months at the time, and he was typically the bottom, but since I really liked him, I thought I’d return the favor. It was an all-around mediocre experience: I was too drunk, it hurt, I thought I had to pee, and I kept asking if I was pooping on him. He finally snapped, “Zach, if you shit, you shit. Shit happens.” (Pun fully intended.)

Even though I was typically a top, men I’d dated had always asked me — actually more likebegged me — to bottom. After that one not-great experience, I always declined. I had too many fears, pain being the main one. I figured it wasn’t for me.

But when my girlfriend told me how arousing she found topping, I promised I’d give it another shot. Not just for her, but for me. I figured I must have been missing something. Queer men had sworn by bottoming since the dawn of man. My gay friends told me there’s nothing more pleasurable than proper prostate stimulation. Millions of men can’t be wrong, can they? I needed to find out.


My kid is OBSESSED with this terrifying video, which is apparently very popular with Parent Twitter’s children in general, and universally loathed by said parents, please please watch it:


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