Did you know most porn is produced for and consumed by men? Weird. This whole time I thought I was romping, fist-first, through a land of egalitarian wonder. Even lesbian porn, which I’ve never even thought to click on until now because I assumed it was for lesbians, it turns out, is actually meant for men. So say the IRL lesbians in this video from  Davey Wavey (via Paper).

The video, while, OK, not exactly surprising in its sociological outlook, is a pretty funny series of reactions of lesbians watching male porn directors’ ideas of what “lesbians” are like in order to cater to male porn viewers’ fantasies about what “lesbians” are like. Most shocking revelation? Most of them don’t perform fellatio on a high heel shoe. Kind of a let down to be honest.

Amanda Bynes was arrested tonight in New York City. Her crime? Loving too much. Also smoking pot in her apartment building, which is a form of loving too much. TMZ has the details, which I’m just going to c/p below, because it doesn’t matter. I was going to be somebody once too, much like Amanda Bynes.

 According to law enforcement sources … police found the weed when they responded to a call for a disorderly person at Bynes’ apartment building.

A source close to Amanda tells us police were called because the troubled actress was behaving erratically … doing things like talking to herself.

We’re told Amanda went ballistic when officers arrived — kicking and screaming during the arrest, and yelling … “Don’t you know who I am?”

Our law enforcement sources say she’s been booked for criminal possession of the pot, as well as reckless endangerment and felony tampering with evidence.

The endangerment and tampering occurred when Bynes allegedly threw a bong out of her apartment window.

Does anyone know if using that many unnecessary line breaks is illegal, because I’m thinking of making a citizen’s arrest right now for that layout.

For real though, none of that is funny or even a joke. The real joke is that we are all going to watch this human being die on the internet, because that’s what we do now. LOL.

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I know digging throughout your old high school box of memories is a drag and a chore — my mother has been trying to get me to clean that stuff out of her house for like a decade now — but, and this is just me talking here, let’s say I had gone to the prom with Barack Effing Obama, I might have shared these things a few years ago. Maybe, like, January 20, 2009 to be exact? All the same, here they are now published in Time magazine, unearthed after all these years by an old classmate named Kelli Allman (née McCormack).  Yeah, but where’s the full, uncropped photo? Donald Trump is wondering right now.

As Time writes:

Barry spent his days at the Punahou School in Hawaii studying, shooting hoops and goofing off with his friends. Greg Orme, a fellow varsity basketball player, was Obama’s constant companion. “They were like brothers,” says Allman. On prom night, the pair double-dated. Obama and his date Megan Hughes, a student at the Hawaii School for Girls at La Pietra, joined Orme at Allman’s house, where the two couples sipped champagne before going to the dance and then an after-party. “It was a really fun, happy time. We were all cracking up, and everyone was smiling,” says Allman. “It was pretty typical from there out as far as what happens at prom: the dinner and the dancing and the photos.”

Here’s an awesomely inspiring study that comes courtesy of the University of Amsterdam: amongst Western nations, people have lost an average of 14 IQ points since the Victorian era according to a metric that measures visual response time. Their reasoning is that genetic selection has become far more casual, as it’s much easier to have babies and keep them alive in 2013 as it was a few centuries ago. More significantly, intelligent women are having children at a lower rate. The uncharitable, idiotic interpretation would be that women’s lib is making us dumber, because all of those smart ladies aren’t around to stick at home, pop out babies, and teach them the right things they need to get through life; instead, our nation’s mothers are teen moms and dum dums who don’t know fuck about shit.

But you can obviously push past that to recognize that equal opportunity between genders still isn’t a thing, and that there are plenty of women who aren’t given that same chance to delay the parenting process and explore their options. We should be having less babies, period, because the world is getting overpopulated; we should also be making sure that as many of the babies that are being had are being brought up by at least one parent who knows what’s going on. So we’re stuck in an awkward middle point, where the options are to regress or progress. It should be clear what the answer is.

Super Mario Dog Is the (New) Greatest Vine Ever, announces E!. Super Mario Dog Powers Up In Awesomest Vine Ever, trumpets the Huffington Post. ’Mario Dog’ Is The Best Vine There Will Ever Be, proclaims Uproxx.  So that’s settled then. Best Vine ever. Admittedly, the list of actually watchable Vines is pretty short. There was that Ryan Gosling Refusing to Eat Cereal thing that we’re all still into, then, uh, my friend showed me one he uploaded of me eating cheese off a plate while standing in the middle of a crowded kitchen at a party once, and that was pretty good. Got to be some somewhat memorable porn clips out there I’m guessing too, right? Maybe a baby taking its first steps, say, for one other example of a potential application of Vine that you would take, then share, and someone might watch. Someone at a concert pointing their camera at the stage? I bet that happens a lot. But, yeah, sure, on top of all of those things, then yes, this thing, which combines two of the internet’s lasting obsessions, animals in clothes, and remembering the ’90s. Pack it in, Vine users, because this is as good as it gets. Nicely done.

It’s been a mixed bag of a month for people concerned about our country’s ability to recognize the basic civil rights of American citizens regardless of sexual identity. On the one hand, Rhode Island, Minnesota, and Delaware all recently legalized gay marriage. This is wonderful news. On the other hand, a New York City man, Mark Carson, was taunted with homophobic slurs by a deranged piece of shit who murdered him in the middle of the street. This was, mind you, in New York City, in a particularly gay-friendly area at that. That certainly wasn’t the only hate-crime perpetrated in the city, or elsewhere throughout the country in recent months.

The slow trudge onward to the point where we can put this ridiculousness behind us, and go about the business of, you know, outrageous decency, takes a few steps forward, even as it takes a few more back. What compels a person to snap so violently at the mere thought of two human beings expressing love for one another remains baffling. An incident today in Paris, however, gives us some hope for a possible way to steer ourselves through these somehow, amazingly, still bigoted times. Is gay marriage driving you literally insane? How about instead of murdering an innocent man, you shoot yourself to death? It will silence the voices in your head, and rid the world of one homophobe at a time. Sounds like a win win we can all get behind.

That’s what Dominique Venner, 78, a far right author in France did today, when he entered the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, placed a letter on the altar, and committed suicide in front of some 1,500 church-goers.

“In a final essay on his website Tuesday, he railed against France’s adoption of a law legalising gay marriage and adoption, urging activists to take measures to protect ‘French and European identities,’” Agence France-Presse reported.

“In a possible reference to his suicide, Venner wrote: ‘There will certainly need to be new, spectacular, symbolic gestures to shake off the sleepiness… and re-awaken the memories of our origins.’

While the public method of his suicide is clearly disturbing, Venner has performed exactly the role that hateful homophobes like he and his far right idealogues throughout Europe and the United States are supposed to do: die off. It’s going to happen to all of them at some point soon enough, so I don’t see any harm in them helping that day come a little sooner by speeding up the process with their own hands.

Ever since the apartment $ubletting $ervice Airbnb, ba$ed in $an Fran$ico, launched in New York City, official$ have been arguing that it violate$ the city’$ law$ here, by $kirting the regulation$ that hotel$ normally have to follow.

Because they’re worried about your safety probably. That has to be it, right?

A judge has finally ruled against a resident who rented out his apartment, assessing $2,400 in fines, a significant discount from the $7,000 they were originally threatening

The New York case is centered around a 2011 law that makes it illegal for New York residents to rent out a property for less than 29 days. It was originally aimed at landlords who bought up residential properties and turned them into hotels. Airbnb has been lobbying legislators to change the law so it clearly protects hosts, like Warren, who are not trying to turn their homes into hotels. CNET

So, the bad news is, you have to think twice now before letting a complete stranger stay in your home while you’re away. On the plus side, you have to think twice now before letting a complete stranger stay in your home while you’re away.

Airbnb has addressed the case, which they were assisting in defending, for obvious reasons.

The sheer power of a tornado can be hard to fathom, until you’ve seen one in action. Monday’s tornado, which devastated Oklahoma, looks to be one of the more destructive examples in recent memory, with dozens reported killed as of this morning. This video, uploaded by a Reddit user (via Uproxx) gives us a pretty clear look at exactly how such destruction can happen. The user who shared the video, taken by his father, explained more:

He was out that way for work today and just happened to be in the right place at the right time. He was worried it was going to come back at him and was searching for a way to scoot out it’s way once he was able to gauge how insanely close it was to him. He hung in there, though. Unbelievable. (via)

Sadly, it is.

When R&B suave-meister Miguel took the stage at last night’s Billboard Music Awards, he had no idea that the following day, thousands of very bored people would be photoshopping an image of him caught in a mid-air leap, onto everything from a scene in Breaking Bad to a good ol’ fashioned rodeo. But that’s what happens when said leap lands on someone’s face. Congratulations Miguel Jontel Pimentel, you’re now a meme.  It happens to all of us at one point or another. But who does Miguel owe his newfound internet fame to? The answer is Ethan Miller, a workhorse photographer for Getty Images, and who was front and center at the award show. But this wouldn’t be the first time Miller snapped his shot at exactly the right nanosecond. Above, we found 14 other examples of Miller’s uncanny knack at capturing what Cartier-Bresson dubbed, “The Decisive Moment.”

Cultural tourism takes plenty of malodorous forms, but there’s a mild difference between drunken co-eds wearing Native American headdresses at music festivals and what’s been found at a Bronx bus company advertising “a ride through a real New York City ‘GHETTO’” which just turns out to be… the Bronx. The New York Post has a galling account of going on a tour with Real Bronx Tours, which shepherded a bus full of “mainly white Europeans and Australians” through some of the Bronx’s less immediately photogenic spots such as a food pantry line, while dropping insensitive narration intended to other for the audience delight.

This quote was a particular lowlight—“I might encourage you to walk with a New Yorker, not because you’re going to get shot, just because sometimes people take advantage if they know you’re a tourist, either charge you too much or maybe someone would pick your pocket”—but the whole trip is fairly appalling, because it’s 2013 and yet there are people treating an entire borough like it’s a novelty to gawk at from behind a safe space. There’s already a stereotype of New York City as glamorous Manhattan and artisinal Brooklyn only, with less attention paid to Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island—and with stuff like this, it’s easy to see why. See all the poors congregating to be fed! Joke about all the murders that used to happen 30 years ago! This and more for the low, low price of your empathy and/or common sense. Come, let us shame this shitty business into change or fiscal insolvency.

The annual Manhattan Cocktail Classic is underway, with two booze-filled days left to go. It’s a chance for bartenders and industry types from around the world to get together and share their knowledge with each other (aka get wasted for work). There’s a full lineup of panels, tastings, and lectures about the wide world of spirits going throughout the city today and tomorrow, which you can see here, including events at some of the best cocktail bars in the city, like Mayahuel, and Pouring Ribbons. Last night, in the pursuit of truth and knowledge, I subjected myself to a bar crawl through the East Village for you, and found some of the best cocktails you need to try, whether or not you’re interested in all the biz-talk.  Here are a few bars you need to check out this week, and the cocktails you’ll want to order. Apologies for the progressively worsening quality of the pictures, but, you know: cocktails happened.

The Beagle. Try:  Gin, aquavit, ginger, line cucumber

Evelyn. Try: S. George gin, green chartreuse, cardamon, agave, lime, grapefruit bitters, absinthe

The Wayland.  Try: Bourbon, Cynar, chiptole infused agave nectar, bitters, mezcal rinse.

You love using your Tumblr blog because you are a Real Live Youth™, bred on the Internet with no substitute. Because RLYs are a demographic in inelastic demand, media conglomerate Yahoo has reportedly begun discussions about acquiring Tumblr for an almost unthinkable price of $1 billion in order to improve their dwindling status amongst the Internet relevancy ranks. That seems like an incredible amount of cash to burn on a website that’s mostly used for Game of Thrones GIFs, James Deen, and weird James of Bones porn mashups. But remember that $1 billion was paid for Instagram, a price which seems… actually still kind of ridiculous for a photo filter service.

But I am not a Tech Guy and thus do not know the proper metaphysical valuation for any Tech Thing. According to those early reports, cherubic overlord David Karp would stay on as the company’s CEO while Yahoo would bring in their more business-minded team to ensure that their purchase doesn’t become an un-monetizable dot com albatross. Can you think of even five ways for Tumblr to make money at face value besides the increased proliferation of sponsored animated GIFs promoting The Great Gatsby or whatever? I cannot. But again, I am not a Tech Guy, and surely there’s some algorithmic mojo Yahoo could splice into its own DNA to save it from the slow death it’s been staving off ever since the failure to acquire Facebook. Maybe every corporation gets more than one chance to reach the RLYs. I can’t wait to participate in an E-book oral history of pre-Yahoo Tumblr.

Business Insider has a list up today called 16 Wildly Successful People Who Majored In English, and it goes a little something like this: “English majors get a bad rap in today’s college debate, and it seems they always have. It’s argued that their education doesn’t provide the necessary skills required in today’s economy.” Like, for example, math. “We’ve included 17 people who prove that success is determined by your drive, not background,” they say, which I guess if you round it down it’s close enough to 16. Maybe it’s a metaphor? That’s an English major thing.

So who are these wildly successful former book-reading, layabouts? Sting, the musician, who did manage to rhyme cough with Nabokov once, so that counts. Also, it says here he was an an actual teacher before his music career, which means the storyline of that song was probably biographical. Gross.

Who else? Mitt Romney! Bahaha, had no idea about this one. Apparently he got his undergrad in English at Brigham Young before going on to become a anthropomorphized walking dollar bill with a penis for a head. How did he get so successful? English! Also his father handed it all to him. But, you know, English majoring had to play a part in that somehow.

Then there’s a couple of CEOs, bla bla bla, followed by Conan O’Brien, Bob Woodward, and Barbara Walters, because, weird, a comedy writer and a couple of journalists were English majors? Did not see that one coming. Next up is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who, much like your humble blogger here, was an English major at the College of Holy Cross. Sure, so I may just be a blogger, and not a Supreme Court Justice, but at least I didn’t turn into literally the least engaged, scandal-plagued, worst of the Supreme Court Justices, so there is that.

See the rest of the 16-17 successful former English majors here.  Then drop out of your program and start studying something you can actually make a living with, like fashion, or rock music, or hang gliding, because these are the outliers. Another thing these successful people all have in commom: Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Dartmouth, Amherst… Maybe try going to one of those schools if you can. Free advice right there.

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Remember Kai, the adorably helpful hitchhiker who helped stop a potentially dangerous case of road rage by wielding a hatchet and coming to the rescue? Boy, did we meme the shit out of that guy. But it turns out the story may have an ending that’s not so appropriate for image macros: Kai, whose real name is Caleb Lawrence McGillvary, is wanted in conjunction with a New Jersey murder. According to ABC:

The victim, Joseph Galfy, was found inside his home on Starlite Drive on May 13, 2013 after officers received a call to check on his well-being.

An autopsy performed the following day determined that Galfy died as a result of blunt force trauma, said Union County Prosecutor Theodore J. Romankow.

Based on the investigation, authorities know that McGillvary has cut his hair in an attempt to alter his appearance.

He was last seen at a light rail station in Haddonfield, N.J. area, said Romankow. He is considered to be armed and dangerous.

Also of note: McGillvary goes by Kai Lawrence, Caleb Kai Lawrence and Kai Nicodemus. Also also of note: Holy shit, hatchet guy maybe killed a guy. Must all our Internet enjoyments let us down? Must all memes turn out to be real people capable of good and evil rather than frozen faces on our computer screens, re-captioned and re-blogged for all eternity? Such a disappointment. By “armed and dangerous” we must assume he’s carrying a hatchet, so beware.

How much porn exists on the Internet? Hard to say. Billions and billions of hours of homemade and professional fucking, spread along the Web in illicitly-formed constellations of seedy porn giants trying to horde as much of the market as they can without disclosing the evil things they surely do to maintain a profit margin. None of them are willing to say how much porn they’re responsible for hosting—only that there is a ton of it, responsible for millions of hits per month and traffic beyond what the most feverish newspaper editor could dream of.

There’s an interesting article at BuzzFeed which tries to get into the nitty gritty of all the smut that’s floating out there only to turn up… basically nothing. Only one site was willing to provide hard numbers: Freeones, a photo gallery repository of “adult models,” claims 445 million page views per month, which is pretty silly. But even that figure didn’t include how much content they were carrying, to say nothing of the dozens of other free and pay sites like Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn, etc., any of which might take a full week of clicking the “next page” icon to get to the end. “I think it is safe to say there is no real idea on how big porn really is,” the managing director of Freeones told BuzzFeed. “It’s like when you read articles about the amount of money porn is generating on the internet. The big billing companies (CCBIll, Epoch to name two big adult ones) don’t publish their numbers, most companies are private companies so we can only guess about their income. The thing with numbers on the internet though is that 85% of them are made up. So no one truly knows.”

It’s like what they say about the amount of plastic that’s floating in the ocean: It could outsize Texas or Canada or something, I don’t know how much exactly, except with porn. A whole Canada’s worth of porn! Say a Hail Mary for society.

Fellas. Are you with me fellas? It can be hard to tell if a hot babe is DTF sometimes, especially if she’s got her nose buried in a book. Professional pushy-crushers know how to figure out from across the Starbucks or the subway whether or not this pretty little thing wants it just by glancing at the title of the book she’s reading, as this new, definitely real scientific study from MissTravel.com—a dating site for young attractive ladies just looking for that special, older, rich man to fly them around the world—points out (via Jezebel).

The study, which, again, is an actual thing where they talked to 47,320 members of the site, which they certainly have, asked them questions about their reading preferences, travelling, and relationships (aka fucking, and specifically their willingness to do it with you, the successful guy, who, ok, maybe isn’t in his twenties anymore, but you’ve seen a bit of the world, and you could teach a thing or two to the right girl who’s willing to listen).

“We found it interesting that most women only read when they are traveling,” says Brandon Wade, Founder & CEO of MissTravel.com in a press release, a person who is lying and/or has never met an actual woman. “We wanted to take that information and see if we could find meaning behind the books they choose, and use it help guide the single man, in his search for romance abroad.”

Romance a broad, am I right?

Here are some of their findings:

If she’s reading The Great Gatsby or Silver Linings Playbook, she’s probably hooked up with a stranger before, and history often repeats itself. Chance she’s DTF: Odds are 3 to 1.

If she’s reading Divergent or Game of Thrones, she is probably willing and able, but is looking for more than just a one time thing. Chance she’s DTF: Odds are 2 to 1 with strings attached.

If she’s reading Fifty Shades or Crossfire, she’s looking to be rescued from a loveless, passionless love life. Chance she’s DTF: Odds are 2 to 1.

If she’s reading BossyPants or Is Everyone Hanging Out With Out Me?, it could go either way. Chance she’s DTF: Odds are 4 to 1.

If she’s reading Gone Girl or 12th of Never, she is probably more interested in the outcome of her book than hooking up with you. Chance she’s DTF: Odds are 7 to 1.

That doesn’t seem very helpful at all, fellas. That’s why we’ve come up with a few handy tips of our own for you, the penis-haver, who wants a nubile young babe with maybe some big titties or small titties, whichever is your preference, titties-wise, to read between your lines, if you know what we mean. (Blow jobs).

1) A lot of women use e-readers now rather than old fashioned books like you used to not read when you were younger. In order to figure out what book they’re actually reading when you approach, steal their Kindle or iPad and hold it over your head for a minute, like, haha, just kidding, I’m not stealing it, don’t be frightened. Then once they realize it was all a hoax, they’ll be so relieved that they’ll probably let you keep the tablet while they dash off. This is because all of their info is on the device and they want you to track them down later. Ladies love to be chased.

2) Is she reading a woman author? Probably, if you’re in New York City, haha. Instant pass. She thinks she’s better than you.

3) Is she reading a book based on a movie that’s currently in theaters? This person is dumb, and probably easy pickings. Invite her back to your place to watch a movie instantly. This always works.

4) Is she reading classic literature? She’s probably longing for a bygone, simpler time. One when men were men, and women were women. Karate kick the book out of her hand and carry her out of the subway. Look, she was the one sending the signals here, not you.

5) Is she reading a sexy romance novel? This woman is a virgin. That’s hot. DTF virgins.

6) Is she reading something nerdy? This girl is used to attention from fat Redditors online. She’s probably faking it too, girls don’t like swords and robots. Show her what a real man is like by talking about your powerful job and actual apartment.

–

Just kidding obviously. But, on the off chance that any actual dude is looking for advice, here’s how you actually approach a woman who is reading any type of book when you see her on the way to work, or in the park, or at a cafe: You don’t, creep. Leave her the fuck alone, she’s reading a book. Books are way more interesting than you. Unless of course the book she’s reading is titled DTF: A Novelization of the Hit Movie, Starring Your Specific Cock and it’s got a picture of your face on the cover, then, ok, in that case you’re probably good to go.

Otherwise, if, for some weird reason, you absolutely must say something, try this: “What are you reading?” At this point she will either glance up, tell you curtly, and go back to reading, ignoring you because you’ve interrupted her, or smile at you, answer, and make eye contact as if to suggest, as normal humans do, that she might be open to further conversation on the matter. This does not mean she is DTF, this means you have now got a minute or two not to be a shithead. Use it wisely.

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With 4,072,385 fans on Facebook, and 659,475 Twitter followers, George Takei, the 75-year-old former Star Trek actor is one of the most beloved people on the internet. Even more impressive than those numbers are the rate at which his material is shared; it’s not unusual for something he posts to amass tens, even hundreds of thousands of likes. Further, the gay rights advocate has done a lot of good work spreading awareness of this important issue, particularly among the sci-fi and genre nerd demographics. He’s also pushed for years for recognition of the civil rights violations Japanese Americans suffered through during World War II. He himself was held prisoner in a camp for four years with his family. In short, he’s a great dude, sort of the lovable gay grandfather from space we all wish we had. Isn’t that nice?

The only problem is that grandfathers are corny as fuck, and instead of shunting him off to the nursing home like we do with our real life ones, only wheeling them out every couple of months for a holiday get-together where we promptly ignore them and their bad jokes, Takei’s blathering is constantly pushed around the internet into our faces by the least funny people we know. It wouldn’t be so bad if Takei was simply telling bad jokes, but his embarrassingly goofy deluge of puns, animal pictures, and image macros constitute the Borgesian aleph of shit-encrusted internet mediocrity spear-headed by the unholy trinity of all-encompassing nothingness whose throne he squats over alongside Buzzfeed and The Oatmeal.

On a day like today on Facebook, 2.5 million people are “talking about him,” which is a better gauge of engagement than raw like numbers. That’s the metric that shows how many of a personality’s given followers are sharing or commenting or liking their posts. Here’s some other raw data: every single one of those people is an amazing dork, and no, not in the good, reclaimed sense of the word, but in the offensively tasteless sense. In fact, if you’ve ever shared one of Takei’s meme turds on Facebook, it’s safe to say you’re exactly the type of person that’s dragging social media into the shitter. Good job.

Big deal, what do I care about anyone else’s fleeting moment of joy, right? Well, the problem isn’t just that one man got popular by sharing bad things. We all do that. I share absolute shit myself all the time. It’s that there’s a calculated manipulation behind the type of content that Takei shares that makes you so susceptible to further share it yourself. It’s a truth regularly acknowledged that positive content is much more likely to go viral than negative content online. Do a quick search for “how to create viral content.” There are hundreds of articles (written by people who would’ve been real estate agents a decade ago, before “social media expert” somehow became a job), encouraging people who want to “tell stories with their brand” that the key to tricking idiots into advertising for them for free is to post the equivalent of a “hang in there” kitten calendar on our collective newsfeeds. That’s the opposite of cute; it’s rather sinister. This is all without even acknowledging that none of this is actually material written or created by Takei. It’s just another stop on the conveyor belt to content oblivion. Who created most of the images and jokes he shares to his own personal brand enrichment? IDK. Doesn’t say.

The secret to Takei’s success, as well as Buzzfeed’s, and The Oatmeal’s, as ironically pointed out in this controversial Buzzfeed piece from a while back, is that people want to share things that make them feel good. Not funny things, mind you, but things that brighten their day. Things that seem familiar and recognizable. This is the antithesis of comedy. Comedians, all of your favorites, the actual funny ones, are the most miserable, shitty human beings you can imagine, capable only of mustering up the energy to hate you more than they hate themselves. This is as it should be. The world is a horrible, frightening place, and pointing this out in surprising fashion is the only way to enable many of us to summon up the courage to go through with the whole ordeal.

Does that make me a cynic and an asshole? Sure, so be it. Unsurprisingly, there’s something that most genuinely good, nice, admirable people, people much like George Takei, the nice guy from the internet, all tend to have in common: a horrible sense of humor, and a lack of self-awareness. Every time you press share on a Takei joke you’re perpetuating a lie, one that says the world is a cute little nice place to live. It’s not. It’s a hell hole. Here’s a joke to share: we’re all going to die.

Still, though: animals that think they’re people.

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This can’t possibly be true, but here we go: Researchers at the University of Nebraska have authored a paper called “The Impact of Marijuana Use on Glucose, Insulin, and Insulin Resistance among US Adults,” which claims—wait for it—that smoking weed makes you skinnier, not fatter, which seems patently false to anyone who’s ever fallen into a combination kush & Cheeto coma. Polling amongst a national sample of over 4,600 adults, the surveyors found that small waists, higher “good cholesterol,” and lower insulin levels were reported amongst the 12% of whom self-identified as active pot users. (It didn’t matter how much they smoked, either, just that they did it regularly.)

As The Atlantic points out, one of the implications is that smoking weed might help the body regulate its blood sugar, which, ha ha ha, really? Isn’t eating a lot of sugar supposed to throw your system all out of wack, and haven’t you ever tasted a Twinkie on weed? It’s like biting into the sun. But perhaps those pot smokers eventually learn to regulate their own diets out of the self-awareness that the more garbage they continue to consume while whacked out, the fatter they’re getting—so that Skittles are replaced with gluten-free granola, Haagen-Dazs is replaced with lemon sorbet, soda is replaced with tea and so forth. Because nothing is scarier than looking at the nutritional value of a Honey Bun when you’re already worried you’re on the verge of having a heart attack, is there? Anyways, toke away; you’ll probably get fat as hell if you don’t, according to science.

Are you old? Hard to say sometimes. Fortunately, we have Buzzfeed to monetize that information for us in a series of images that settle the question of your temporal condition. Just look at all these stunning simpletons who had no clue what their own specific age was until they scanned a listicle on the internet called 43 things that will make you feel old. It was a series of pop culture references they remembered from the ’90s: floppy disks, Titanic, Reading Rainbow, images which amounted, in whole, to a sort of The Full House jpeg of Dorian Gray.

–

The visitor could see no change in any of the faces on the post, save in the author profile of Matt Stopera. In his eyes there was a look of cunning and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. The thing was still loathsome—more loathsome, if possible, than before—and the scarlet dew that spotted his aggregating eyes seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilled. The Buzzfeed fan trembled. Had it been merely vanity that had made them click on this link? Or the desire for a new sensation, as their friends on Facebook who shared the post had hinted, with their RTs?  Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things baser than we are ourselves? Or, perhaps, all these?

And why was the stain of the site’s influence larger than it had been a few months ago? It seemed to have crept like a horrible disease over the wrinkled internet. There was a blood red header on the top of the post, as though the thing had dripped — blood even onto the hack that had wielded the blogging software.

By sharing it did it mean the viewer was to confess? To give oneself up and be put to a sort death of taste? He LOL’d. He felt that the idea was monstrous. Besides, even if he did confess to his horrific sense of humor, who would not share in this feeling of amusement with him? There was no trace of the cultured man anywhere online. Everything belonging to them had been destroyed, washed away in a flood of listicles. He himself had burned what had been left of it with his inattention to #longform content. The world would simply say that he was mad if he didn’t share it. They would shut him up if he persisted in his demands for originality, of thought, of the most basic semblance of writing coherence. Yet it was his duty to share the post, to suffer public shame, and to make public atonement, if only to the 1 in 50 of his social media contacts who would recognize the sharing for what it was.

There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven. Nothing that he could do would cleanse him till he had told his own sin. His sin? He shrugged his shoulders. FAIL. idk.

The death of the thoughtful website seemed very little to him. He was thinking of The New York Times‘ hipster trend pieces. Upvotes on Reddit. Lulz. For it was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul that he was looking at, this tablet, this hand-held portrait of his soul. Vanity? Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there been nothing more in his acceptance of the lowest common denominator than that? There had been something more. At least he thought so. But who could tell? . . . No. There had been nothing more. Through vanity he had shared this link. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of content-creation. For inclusion’s sake he had tried the denial of self. He recognized that now. Gazing into the eyes of the fondly remembered celebrities, the consumer products, the film stills, the magazine covers from a specific decade he had lives through, it struck him, them, all of us, dagger-like, in the heart.

But this decades-worn content—was it to dog him all his life? Was he always to be burdened by his pop culture past? Was he really to share this? He didn’t want to. There was only one bit of evidence left against him. The blog post itself —that was evidence. He would destroy it. Why had he kept sharing these atrocities so long? Once it had given him pleasure to watch the internet changing and growing old. Of late he had felt no such pleasure. It had kept him awake at night. When he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon his newsfeed and witness his crimes. It had brought melancholy across his passions. Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it.

Later that evening his servant and footmen would enter, and come across his lifeless bodies, withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It wouldn’t be until they examined the iPhone clutched in his hand that they’d recognize the body. On the screen, a splendid portrait of Jonathan Taylor Thomas as we remembered him from the ’90s.

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Let’s hear it for our non-coastal gays! The real gays of the future, they’re the generations of non-fashion and/or non-hollywood and/or non-public-facing gays whose exits from their respective closets and arrivals at their respective altars will shape the cultural landscape of our great nation. Pffffffft, us New York/LA/San Francisco gays have been preaching to the choir for years (ain’t nothing wrong with that, I’m just saying), but it’s the Mid-Western minds that take a bit more working on. The civil rights movement for gay equality will be won in the middle of the country, where the most work still needs to be done. As reported by The New York Times, Minnesota is the 12th state to pass a same-sex marriage bill and the first in the Midwest to venture outside of a court ruling. We like a this, we like it a lot. Next up, the lens pans to Illinois, a state that currently allows civil unions, but whose State House Members are considering a same-sex marriage bill already ok’d by the State Senate. C’mon Illinois, keep it cute!