LEFT SIDE: As we know from the 2000 box office smash Remember the Titans, the left side is the strong side. Also, your basic information is here on the left side.

Tip: follow the instructions and make sure there is an apt number of “street addresses” listed.

1.)   Rents: This is slang for parents. Just write “yes or no”

2.)   Royalties:  This is what some might call a “portmanteau,” which is when two words are fused together for the sake of a Lewis Carroll novel or Gawker headline. This box indicates how much money you spent defending your loyalties in last year’s Royal Wedding. For instance, I spent $75 dollars on scented markers for a poster that said “Go William!” Considering he won that wedding in a landslide, I think we can all agree that was money well spent.

3.)   Other income: However much money you made playing an “other” on ABC’s Lost.

4.)   Federal income tax withheld: This is the amount of money the government took out of your paycheck to pay for their taxes. It’s difficult to understand because it’s written in Old English. Can you imagine if we still used words like “withheld” today?

5.)   Fishing Boat Proceeds: This number should equal the correct number of times a hypothetical procession of fishing boats proceeds to circle your money without getting stuck in any kind of reef or debris. This does not apply if you don’t have floating money yet. (But what are you waiting for?!)

6.)   Medical and healthcare payments: The amount of money you spent on medical procedures for you or any of your pets.

7.)   Nonemployee compensation: Money you paid throughout the year to any nonemployees. This includes: waiters, camels, childhood friends or anyone who owns their own business.

8.)   Substitute payments in lieu of dividends or interest: You probably don’t know this but “lieu” is the British word for toilet. So, this would be anytime you paid a substitute teacher to go to the toilet because you were not interested in what was going on.

9.)   Payer made direct sales of $5,000 or more of consumer products to a buyer (recipient) for resale: I know what this means, but I’m not going to tell you because I think it would be better if you learned about it on your own.

10.) Crop insurance proceeds: This is how many times you cropped your insurance proceeds out of Facebook pictures.

11.) and 12.) These are left blank to encourage you to make up your own numbers.

13.) Excess golden parachute payments: This is the amount of money you spent in the last year    tailoring your golden parachute. This includes the removal of the excess material and having it turned into a killer bedspread.

14.) Gross proceeds paid to an attorney: The number here signifies any completely disgusting payments you made to a lawyer for any reason.

15a.) and 15b.) Section 409A Deferrals and section 409A income: These are just typos.

16.) State tax withheld: More Old English, but pretty self-explanatory: just state the amount of tax you want held.

17. State/Payer’s state no.: State the payers and then state “no.” If you do not write “no” you will have to pay, so be careful.

18. State income: The income of the entire state in which you live, in my case that is New York, which is probably at least a few million. New York has its hands in a lot of different cookie jars. As everyone knows, cookies are expensive so it must do something to pay for them. I usually just put “a lot.”

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Thought Catalog: I know you’re living in LA now, and you just had a baby. Has that affected your routine as a writer at all?

Ned Vizzini: I don’t have a routine as a writer. I am motivated by deadlines and guilt and fear of death. I get things done when I have to get them done. Moving to Los Angeles has made me more productive because there’s less ambient noise. Of course having a baby is a huge commitment but it also negates lots of other commitments so it evens out and leaves me time to write. And my wife is instrumental in keeping me focused and giving me time to work.

TC: What are you doing out in LA?

NV: Having fun and making money.

TC: Anna Boden, and Ryan Fleck did an amazing job on IKOAFS. What was it like working with them?

NV: Ryan and Anna were great. They really understood the novel, gave me a chance to provide a song for the film, and even offered me a cameo in the film. And when I turned that down, they gave my book Be More Chill a cameo instead (which I didn’t realize until I saw a final cut). That was very sweet and cool of them.

TC: Jesse Eisenberg did the audio book for Be More Chill. Did you ever get to meet him? Have you read any of his McSweeney’s pieces, or seen his new play, Asuncion? You guys, on the surface at least, have a ton in common.

NV: I’ve never met Jesse Eisenberg but I hope to. In addition to doing the audio book for Be More Chill he read from It’s Kind of a Funny Story at a benefit for the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, a nonprofit that I’ve been proud to support for years. I like his “Manageable Tongue Twisters” on McSweeney’s.

TC: Emily Gould wrote a lot of disparaging things about you for Gawker. Was it a bummer reading that stuff?

NV: Oh jeez, I’m not sure if Emily Gould wrote those posts or if it was someone else at Gawker. It’s fine. They called me out and I deserved it; it’s not something to get bummed out about. I don’t think I even generated much traffic for the site. I did get a personal assistant; I haven’t had one for years, though. I’ve learned how to manage my time better and don’t need one now.

TC: What was it like working for Russ Smith?

NV: You’re referring to my time at New York Press in the late 1990s. Russ Smith was the paper’s founder and he wrote the “Mugger” column but I worked more closely with editors Sam Sifton and John Strausbaugh. (What was it like working for them? It was awesome.) Russ was and remains a singular character and I’ve always appreciated his support; he now runs Slice Today.

TC: There has been a lot of talk about there not being enough male YA readers, and the YA market being over-saturated with female protagonists. Would you say most of your readers are female? Would you ever write a book from the perspective of a female?

Ned: I’m lucky to belong to the subset of YA authors who can write a book from a male perspective and have publishers consider publishing it. That’s been true from the beginning; Free Spirit Publishing put out Teen Angst? Naaah… in 2000 with the idea that I had a voice that could appeal to guys. To this day, the feedback I get is about 50/50 male/female. What can I say — thank you, males! I have considered and continue to consider writing from the perspective of a female. Stay tuned.

TC: Can you tell us a little bit about The Other Normals? Will it deal with the same themes that you’ve tackled in previous books?

NV: I don’t think about “themes” when I write; I think of “seeds.” For Be More Chill the seed was me watching MTV and wondering what it would be like if a product could make you cool and listening to the Drunk Horse song “AM/FM Shoes”. For It’s Kind of a Funny Story, the seed was going to the psych hospital. The Other Normals comes from a different place. I’ll try to explain.

When I was 13 I got into Dungeons and Dragons, but I never actually played it because you needed more than two people and I didn’t have that many friends. What I did do was read the books obsessively. I found that I could stare at charts of weapon statistics and spells and be totally happy. It was weird how happy it made me. And I came to realize that it was because the world around me at the time was complicated (I was supposed to like girls but I hated them; I wasn’t sure how to dress or act or speak) but the world of the game was simple.

I think this is the decision teenagers make when they get into fashion or poker or Skyrim. They want to shut out the complicated world in favor of a world they can control. And I wanted to write about a kid who has shut out the real world in favor of a fantasy world, but who has to leave the fantasy world behind to fully bloom. And The Other Normals is the result of that.

TC: Talk about Urban Renewal Renewal! Are the concerns about URR’s quality all in your head?

Ned: Uh, Urban Renewal Renewal is a novel that I wrote in 2007-2009 about a guy who tries to de-gentrify his Brooklyn neighborhood. It was my first attempt at non-YA book. Over the years I have harbored ambitions to write literary fiction and that book was me getting that out of my system. I’m not the only person who has concerns about its quality. A very very small number of people have PDFs of it. The opinions range from “this isn’t the right thing for you to be doing” to “it’s good” to “I think you have to split it into two books” to… nothing at all because the person hasn’t read it in the two years since I’ve sent it. Maybe it’ll mutate pleasantly someday. Stay tuned.

TC: I know that IKOAFS took a month to write. I was wondering, what are your thoughts on NaNoWrimo?

NV: I’m a little embarrassed that It’s Kind of a Funny Story took me a month to write. It was a crucial moment in my life. I don’t think it will be repeated. I certainly don’t recommend it to anyone and I don’t think it should be mandated by the blogosphere. NaNoWrimo is good because it weeds out a certain type of person who always thought that they “had a book in them” but doesn’t really like writing. Other than that… I know some people get a lot out of it but every time it rolls around I think, “You’re not supposed to be able to do it in a month. You’re supposed to suffer like you’re supposed to.”

TC: Do you ever just want to be mean?

Ned: Of course I want to be mean sometimes, but every time I am it blows up in my face. You have to be a transgressive genius to get away with public meanness.

TC: Can you confirm that the film does imply that Bobby, Zach Galifianakis’ character, kills himself?

NV: I think Bobby is headed toward suicide at the end of the Funny Story film. You’d have to ask Ryan and Anna about their intent, but I think the final shot of him is a glimpse into how suicidal people move and think.

TC: Will there ever be a movie for Be More Chill or Teen Angst? Naaah . . .?

NV: I don’t know! Stay tuned.

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Sheila McClear

Aeric Meredith-Gougon

TC: You moved from Detroit to New York pretty much on a whim. Did you move here because you wanted to work here?

SM: Yeah! Just for the same reason anybody moves here. I wanted to be around that sort of energy New York has. So nothing special, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I just figured I’d get some job at a publishing house for like, 15 bucks an hour. Which obviously, I didn’t accomplish [laughs].

TC: You were writing in Detroit, right?

SM: Well, I was a reporter at a labor publication right out of college, it was a monthly. Very grassroots – it was sort of a watchdog publication. It wasn’t like, a rigorous thing.

TC: So then you moved here and started to dance [in the peep shows]. I know you went to a few places and tried it out a couple of times… but you describe yourself as shy? How did you overcome that shyness to audition, dance?

SM: I don’t think I overcame it – I think I thought [dancing] would help me overcome my shyness, but the weird thing is – and I’ve heard this from other dancers and strippers – most are shy [in their everyday lives]. It’s pretty easy to take your clothes off in front of strangers, especially when you’re in a venue where that’s what you do. So I guess maybe one of my real fears was rejection and intimacy – if I’m with a guy I really like, I’m still a bit shy taking my clothes off. But that’s ‘cause it means something! And what I learned [dancing] is that I didn’t have to give into my shyness, because it didn’t mean anything. When you take your clothes off for someone you don’t know… when that’s what you’re expected to do… I don’t know, it just felt like I was at the doctor’s office [laughs].

TC: It seems like, when you were dancing, maybe a few people knew, but not really? Did you confide in anyone at home, or…

SM: You mean, like my family?

TC: Your family, or friends back home, any friends here… did anyone kind of know what was going on?

SM: At first, I had no friends here, because I’d just moved here, and then for a long time after that all of my friends were strippers. I think I told one or two people back home… even some of my closest friends only came to find out when the book was released. I don’t know, I didn’t want to bring it up, and then explain it, and just… ugh. I told one or two guy friends, maybe three, and they all sort of expressed dismay and disapproval but were also like, “Well, we’re not gonna get all judgey.” I remember one guy friend, he was really upset with me, and I was like, “Well, what’s the big deal? You go to the local strip club all the time,” and he was like, “Well, it’s different ‘cause I’m a guy.” Then he said, “You know, you were always the smartest one in class… I thought you were gonna be the editor of a magazine or something… now you’re just another stripper.” And I was like, “Yeah, but it’s still okay for you to go watch,” and he said, “Well, yeah!” [laughs]

TC: I know you had to dirty talk sometimes, how do you feel about those words – are you kind of desensitized to them?

SM: You mean like cunt or pussy? [laughs]

TC: [laughs] Yeah, or even whore, slut…

SM: I don’t think those words will ever lose their meaning, for better or worse, because society has turned them into weapons. But the girls at the peep show, we would – I wouldn’t really, but – we would talk shit about each other. A girl would do something during a show or say something that we’d overhear and we’d be like, “She’s a hoe, that’s nasty” or we’d say, “I wouldn’t do that in a show, that’s gross.” There’s always women judging each other, even when you all work in the sex industry. I did it too, and I tried not to, but especially when it’s your job and your history, you start drawing these arbitrary lines like, “Okay, if I cross that line, that’s bad.”

TC: Do you feel like you needed [those lines]?

SM: Yeah, definitely. I was going to say it gives you the illusion of control, but it actually does give you a sense of control. If you have rules, and you don’t break them and you say no, you have some control. At my job now, I can’t say no… not really. That was one of the few jobs where I could say no, I have to say. If it were raining, I could say no. I could go home whenever I wanted… I probably had the most control there, of all the jobs I’ve had.

On my first night, after freshman orientation, I’d start a cassette-only record label with the American Apparel model down the hall. We’d release dubstep remixes of witch house songs and make out in front of popular party photographers. We’d break up after she cheats on me with Ezra Koenig, and then I’d write a 20,000 word blog post calling Vampire Weekend our generation’s Boston.

This post would capture the attention of editors citywide, six of whom would hire me (at a rate of $1,000 an hour) as a party reporter. Then I’d attend parties, mostly; an ex-girlfriend might see a picture of me telling Jesse Eisenberg a very funny joke on Gawker, and rue the day she ended things with me, cool city guy.

I’d smoke cigarettes like I do now, but at NYU this would be, for some reason, fascinating; “how absolutely wonderful you smell,” Karen O would say, climbing out of my Bushwick love palace/D.I.Y. space some Sunday morning. (Beach Fossils, playing the night before, would tell me they’re naming their album after me, and that every chilled-out note of it would be a tribute to my largess and ineffable hipness.)

I would finally accept one of the hundreds of personalized, gold-embossed art gallery party invitations I’d received, and immediately upon stepping into the gallery would 1) become the perfect sort of drunk where you’re calm and buzzed and not vomiting either your heart or dinner out, 2) befriend James Franco (“I loved Howl,” I would say, by way of introduction) and 3) have my picture taken by Terry Richardson, under the (mistaken) assumption that I am a drugged, naked twenty-one-year-old. Franco and I would snort prescription pills off the Brooklyn Bridge and talk about being young and attractive and famous.

Then he’d jump.

I’d write about the experience for the Village Voice, recount it, teary-eyed, on the Today show, and routinely use it as a pick-up line. (“You know, I’m the guy who was standing next to James Franco when he killed himself,” I’d say. “Here is a business card with my home address, Tumblr handle, and preferred underwear style,” they’d say, handing me a business card and running out the door to get things ready for me.) Eventually I’d probably go to class, and pass on the strength of my charm alone, and then maybe I’d go into advertising, or academia.

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WTF. Shouldn’t this money be tied up in investments or something? Apparently Dealbreaker stumbled upon this viral piece of gold in East Hampton, proving that, as NYMag had to say, the fuckers in East Hampton are as rich as everyone secretly guesses they are. Other than that, I have no idea what the story behind this is – but according to Dealbreaker, it’s been revealed that the owner of the receipt was a hedge fund manager who “hadn’t used an ATM since Lehman.” Heh.

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Chalk up a point for atheism – the LA Times has reported that “young adults who regularly attend religious activities may be more prone to obesity by middle age than their nonreligious peers.”

Researchers followed some 2,400 people for 18 years, categorizing each participant’s religious participation as “high (once a week or more), medium (regularly but not weekly), low (rarely) and none.” After controlling for variables such as sex, age, race, income, education, and body mass index, they found that those categorized as having “high” religious participation were 50% more likely to be obese by the time they entered middle age than subjects whose religious participation was “none.”

“It’s possible that getting together once a week and associating good works and happiness with eating unhealthy foods could lead to the development of habits that are associated with greater body weight and obesity,” said lead author Matthew Feinstein of Northwestern Medicine, in a news release. “We don’t know why frequent religious participation is associated with development of obesity, but the upshot is these findings highlight a group that could benefit from targeted efforts at obesity prevention.”

Well well well. We might not know why religious participation is associated with getting fat, but may I be the first to suggest to the pious toning up your religious selves by pole dancing for Jesus?

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We recently had the most exciting week ever in Brokelyn land: a story by newbie writer Quiana Stokes about how and why she passes the time as a SAHG (Stay At Home Girlfriend) set off a firestorm of discussion, dissent and some downright nastiness internet wide. Readers questioned why we would run such a thing: on top of the regressive nature of her feelings about gender roles, the post wasn’t our usual mix of entertaining-but helpful journalism. Commensurate with the talkback were calls for any stay-at-home boyfriends to out themselves: after all, that seems more in line with the trends of our age. Magazines and blogs are rife with tales of men receding into a habit of perpetual adolescence as women outrank, outflank and outnumber them more and more, especially in New York; dyed-in-the-wool male ego is losing ground to cold economic reality.

Then I thought: if we did run a SAHB piece that had the potential to generate the same level of controversy — let’s say the SAHB argues why you should stay at home ironing your working lady’s panties instead of going to watch the game — who would be the dude blogs leading the charge of apoplectic indignant rage? What sites would whip up foment of masculine ire that a poor, misguided (Ms.-guided?) bro in Brooklyn was devoting himself to domesticated doldrums?

The answer, I realized, is that there aren’t any.

First, you have to understand the scope of the response to the SAHG piece from the female blogosphere. It angered people, but in terms of internet metrics, it was our Avatar. Within hours, SAHG became our most-popular post of all time. Linkbacks and comments poured in from all corners of the internet. Nick Cannon’s producers asked if Quiana would come on his radio show (side note: Nick Cannon has a radio show?); Kathie Lee and Hoda even whittled away a little nook in their towering mountain of intractable Today Show blather to opine on the topic.

Putting aside the irrefutable data of a smash hit-blog post, the content wasn’t really my cup of tea. The author certainly had an interesting perspective from her first-person experience living this kind of lifestyle, but I kept wondering if the ghost of Betty Friedan would be haunting our interwebs, preparing to strike our site with a volley of hijacked Viagra and Cialis ads (which did happen, btw, though we are still unraveling the mystique of the cause).

Nor was it the cup of tea of many of the major blogs that focus on women’s issues: the post got picked up by Jezebel, Gawker, The Hairpin and The Frisky, most of which took time to deliver an extended riff on the topic. You could sense furrowing brows through the intertubes:

The Hairpin‘s response was simply: “LOL is this a joke?” Gawker: “It could be a tongue-in-cheek kind of jokey type thing, right? A humorous essay chronicling the silly misadventures of a young woman stepping into more ‘traditional’ domestic duties while her live-in boyfriend is at work and she’s looking for a new job. But… it’s just not. It’s really just not.” Jezebel: “But let’s face it: the tone of this is…troubling. Not least because when one is in the author’s situation, it’s not that straightforward: one often doesn’t feel good about oneself, lacks confidence and doesn’t feel like the equal partner you once were.” The Frisky (Who, after declaring this story was linkbait, went on to link and write extensively about it): “Could I live like Quiana Stokes? Probably not. I’d get bored.”

These blogs come from varying points of view but all tried to contextualize the response of smart, skeptical women across New York City and the country. I read all these sites regularly for exactly this kind of viewpoint. But there’s nothing out there on par that curates dude opinion in the same way.

Think about it: What are the leading dude blogs out there today? I can’t think of one, and I’m a dude who blogs for a living. Switch that question around and I could name you some really top-notch sites that cover lady issues. The Hairpin, for instance, has lodged itself firmly in my regular blog rotation, not just for its entertaining looks at all things with a women-related tilt (see: stock photos of women laughing alone while eating salad) but also for its insightful commentary and its quiver of smart writers with honest takes on issues the modern, educated girl faces (see: Emily Gould’s open letter on what it means to have a 14-year-old magazine editor).

Jezebel traffics in celebrity gossip, but it also puts together serious projects and — gasp — actual journalism. Right or wrong in their conclusions, Jezebel‘s recent expose on the Daily Show being a boys club (aka “The Male-y Show”) involved serious reporting, interviews and planning, much more so than just posting a listicle or a news item and dashing off some snarky comments.

Slate‘s blog The XX Factor keeps a running tab on key issues related to women (Lara Logan, the lack of women published in lit mags, etc.). I would have also pointed to Heartless Doll, the acerbic and bitterly hip women’s blog run out of SF Weekly until it was shuttered in May. And there’s more. None of these read like an issue of Glamour, either: I can click on a Frisky post about Feminist Coming Out Day, for instance, without feeling like I’m eavesdropping on a grade school slumber party.

So what are the dude blog equivalents? Go ahead and try to think of some, because I’m more than willing to learn. The only dude blogs that come to mind are the supremely superficial ones: Guyism (tagline: “Hot Girls, Humor, Videos, Photos, Sports, Beer, Celebrities”); Asylum, which also shuttered last month, leaving as its swan song an Andrew WK interview, in which he announces his intent to go into outer space; Thrillist (unofficial tagline: “WHATTUP BROSEPH?!?!”), a repository of what to do and buy now that your frat activities director isn’t around (I site for which I apparently don’t meet the bro standard; I got rejected from a job there last year).

There’s AskMen.com, with its watch brand reviews, and Esquire‘s website, with its “what she wants you to wear” huffy insistence on swarthy materialism as the preferred style. Or Brobible, the voice of the “Brommunity,” a site that should speak for itself (but I’ll speak for it too: the words “Big Boob Bonanza” currently appear on the homepage).

Even when these sites are at their best, they lack a sense of humor about their subject matter, and about being a dude in general. Those sites exist in the old archetype of the “men’s” magazine that hasn’t changed much in decades: fashion, understanding your lady, the sexiest women in X field (because we never expect successful women to be succesexxxy too!). Those media are for “men”: 9-5ers, execs, suit-wearers, dads, old-fashioned bros clinging to their Axe body spray, wooing pearl-clad ladies in Leer Jets soaring above pristine Caribbean waters on weekend getaways.

Wake up. Check Manhunt, Adam4Adam, DList. Leave computer on. Decide to waste time by taking a shower. So I shower, dry off, get dressed. Come back to see if new messages have materialized. They have. A flashing red light tells me I have two new messages, plus one from a dude who unlocked his Private Pics for me. I don’t look, save the messages for later. Running late. Am sure to x-out all the tabs before I close the computer. Can’t go to class using a computer with a bunch of penises on the screen.

On the way to class think: Am I a sex addict? Wonder if any of my professors do the same thing. Remember the time I saw this really famous professor’s Manhunt profile. Nine inches. Wow.

Lunchtime. I’m in the dining hall on my campus. It’s packed, which is why I coyly cock my computer to the left, away from everybody, so that my screen is invisible, nobody can see me the second I sign back into Manhunt. But even if they can see me, I don’t mind, feel like a hot piece of ass is just around the corner. Am sure all the other gays in the room know what I’m doing, am sure they’ve all cocked their computers at some point.

No new messages, only the same two from before. Open them up. One message comes from eXtAcYnSANfRaNciScO1967. I’m really confused by the typography, a minus, and judging by the date (1967) the dude is too old, a double minus. So I ex him out.

Next is a message from white4latinoass that, admittedly, isn’t that creative a screen name and I’m not that into racial stereotyping so I’m already put off. Read his profile. Dude’s into crystal meth and that kind of freaks me out so I don’t say anything back. Bro gets exed out.

Open a new tab, move on to read Gawker. I stare at the articles forever but never really zero in on anything in particular. Start to dread my reading for the day. Class starts in an hour and a half, and I’m supposed to give a presentation on Judith Butler, but I haven’t even cracked open her book. Don’t know the title. Don’t know what it’s about. Don’t know what I’m supposed to read. Don’t give a shit about gender. Everything’s constructed. Everybody’s doing drag. Gender is a performance. Blah blah blah.

2:38 p.m. Class is at four p.m. There’s time. I re-sign in to Manhunt. There’s time. The computer remembers my username and password, all I do is press enter. Notice that 10 dudes have looked at my profile in the last 15 minutes, not all of them hot, so I edit out the ugly ones, only looking at the hot ones. Some of them look back, no message, so I look back, too. No message. Then they look back and I re-look back. No message.

Five minutes later, notice the hot rower dude in my chemistry class is logged on. Score. Didn’t know he was gay. Says he’s bi-curious, says he’s a top. I’m excited. Send him a message.

MAXIGAY: Hey bro, how are you? [Send]

[REDACTED]: Hi, don’t I know you?

MAXIGAY: Yeah, we’re in that class together. The one with Professor Sterling. You’re so hot but I never knew how to bring it up. And now you’re here! [Send]

[REDACTED]: Oh yeah, right! Yah man I hate that class. Fuckin’ Science. I knew you were n2 me, I see you looking. Sooooooooooo what r u into?

[Think it’s really stupid and annoying when people ask this. What do you think I’m into, turtles? It says right in my profile what I’m into, so don’t ask.]

MAXIGAY: The usual stuff. I really like giving head though. What about you? (Send).

[REDACTED]: Yeah? Schweet. [This is how he spells it, a minus] I LOVE getting my cock blown, really get into peeing on a guy.

[Really?]

MAXIGAY: Wow [the wow is in relation to the pee, which I am DEF not into]. [Send]

Look back at his profile, see that he has 10 pics but only one of them is unlocked so I kindly ask to see the other nine. It’s protocol.

[REDACTED]: Yah no problem dude.

[See the pics. Him with his cock out on a table, showing how long it is next to a remote control. Him with a rowing stick in his hand, like he’s coming to spank you. Him lathered up in the shower. Him in with the entire crew team in a boat, all their faces are blacked out. Him next to a trophy he won at some competition, wearing a backwards cap with all his other bros, their faces blacked out. Him in a desert (Iraq?). Him eating a giant slice of pizza. Him on a laptop in a popular campus coffee shop (Espresso Royale) doing calculus. Him at a Kings of Leon concert next to some chick, probably his girlfriend (who doesn't’ know he fucks boys).]

MAXIGAY: Great pics. What are you looking for? [Send]

[Feel kind of stupid asking this. Everybody knows what this site is for. Except that I never meet anybody, prefer the thrill of talking to people more than actually meeting anybody. It’s like interactive porn.]

[REDACTED]: u wanna comeover? havent blown a load in 4 days.

[Think very seriously about this. Class is happening in just a few minutes, but if this dude lives on campus I can pop over real quick, in, out, and still save 45 minutes to semi-prepare for my presentation. What Would A Sex Addict Do?]

MAXIGAY: Where do you live? [Send]

[REDACTED]: I live next to the UgLi.

[My Judith Butler class is in the UgLi! Jackpot! Start to get excited about messing around with the closeted rower.]

MAXIGAY: Oh, nice. I’m by there. Should I head over now? [Send]

[He responds instantly. How does he do it?]

[REDACTED]: Yeah, come now. Roomie’s gone, can’t have him coming back when I’m getting blown by another guy. Haha [probably a nervous “haha”]. Just try not to look really gay when you come over. Don’t want anyone to get suspicious.

[Try not to look really gay? Guess that means I won’t wear my Liberace costume with sparkling Elton John sunglasses and my Lady Gaga headpiece. Decide it’ll be worth it. Maybe I’ll skip class. Who needs to read Judith Butler? I’m about to act gender out right now, for the next 25 minutes.]

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People Who Are Embarrassing on Facebook

These people are generally your mom or extended family, and in rare cases, they can be really good friends that simply don’t ‘get’ the internet. If the embarrassing person is your mom, she’ll usually comment on your Facebook wall on a too-regular basis stuff like “How’s my baby boy?” and post the denim-themed, terribly humiliating family pictures you felt pressured into last year and tag you in every single one of them. People who are embarrassing on Facebook perhaps don’t seem to understand the temporal and widespread aspects of the internet and Facebook i.e. once you comment on someone’s wall “come over i miss u lets cuddle,” everyone, including your exes and friends and potential love interests, could possibly see it. If that isn’t the case – that they don’t understand the temporal and widespread aspects of the internet and Facebook – the alternative is even more uncanny and disturbing: that they find their comments and mass-tagging and overly revealing actions acceptable, normal, exciting, etc.

via Brandon Scott Gorrell

People Who Are Obscenely Obsessed with Social Networking

These people are in their twenties or thirties living in urban areas. They consider the promotion of their personal brand their top priority. Personal philosophies may include: “Didn’t Twitpic, didn’t happen” or “History is made through Facebook photos.” When socializing with technological devices, they prefer to hang out with people with influential online presences who are ‘down’ to play the social media game with you. Preferably these people wear clothes by brands with active online presences, hang out at places with strong online presences, and discuss topics that are highly relevant and quotable. They are usually charming and may genuinely enjoy hanging out IRL, but can’t fully relax without taking a strategic picture or updating their status. They consider themselves ‘cultural tastemakers’ and use social networking to inform and entertain their audience. When saying goodbye, they are more likely to say “@ me!” or “Tag me!” where most normal people would suggest “Call me!”

via Kelley Hoffman

People Who Have Won the Internet

People who deftly dramatize and inhabit the internet; people who have read the whole thing; people who determine the rules of internet engagement. There aren’t a lot of them but there are too many to name–so maybe it is time we started a list. I will offer my top five: Molly Lambert, Julian Assange, Tavi, Andrey Ternovskiy, and Ned Raggett.

via Molly Young

People Who Have Forgotten What They Were Supposed to Be Doing

You might very well be a person who has forgotten what you are supposed to be doing. If you are, it is likely you were supposed to be paying a bill online, writing a time-sensitive email to someone, locating a map of a location to which you are imminently traveling, updating your online dating profile because you are feeling more lonely than normal, checking the weather because you want to know whether or not to bring an umbrella, emailing someone in the Accounts Payable department of a magazine you write for because they can’t seem to put a check in the mail, Skyping with your mom, watching a video of how to install inside-mount blinds, and/or buying a plane ticket you have been putting off buying but now it just doesn’t make any sense at all. Instead of doing any of these things you are watching a YouTube or Vimeo video, looking at the top ten most emailed articles on the New York Times and getting upset at how inane they all are and then reading one anyway, following a trail of clicks on Wikipedia until you forget where you started or why, reading your horoscope on free will astrology, watching Marcel the shell (again), looking at various locations of your childhood on Google Maps, repeatedly looking up fares for international flights you can’t afford, reading an article on Thought Catalog or HTMLGIANT or The Rumpus and then the string of increasingly irate comments dangling under said article and/or Googling yourself.

via Catherine Lacey

People Who Are Dads

Dads use Internet Explorer and have not installed flash. Dads think Firefox and Mozilla are rock bands or street gangs. Dads never empty their Recycle Bin so that a .jpeg entitled IMG_0549 of Dad from circa 2001 holding a 7.25 lbs. trout forever resides in both one’s mind and said bin. Dads use Bing because it’s the default search engine on their PC, which they got at CostCo. Dads actually say “www” before the name of the website. Dads got their cookies all over homedepot.com comparing lawnmower prices. Dads got their cookies all the fuck over macys.com shopping for fleece and slippers. Dads got their cookies all over redtube.com barely DSL-streaming hentai porn asking “what the hell is this?” inside their “computer room” at night while Moms are applying moisturizer to their brittle faces. Dads’ mousepads are Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore motif(s), purchased in the gift shop, along with beef jerky and Snapple for the long ride back. Dads go to “www” YouTube “dot com” to find out what the big fuss is, and while confronted by a Lady Gaga or Björk video, say “this woman clearly has a problem.” Dads got McAfee Security Scan popping up from the porn, which uses big time CPU and slows everything down, so Dads get upset asking “what the hell is wrong with this thing?” So then Dads go to CostCo the next week, or month, for a new computer saying to the youngster working minimum wage that he knows times are a changin’ and where are the Dell computers, you know, the ones that came out last year, and are on sale.

via Jimmy Chen

People Who You Went to Grade School with Who Are Now Delusional About Your Former Friendship

You don’t really remember this person. You think maybe your mom made you invite them to your 11th birthday party, but you are not sure. Fast-forward 10-15 years, and they have found you on Facebook and Twitter, and added you on Gchat by finding your email address on your portfolio site. They remember “the good times back in the day.” You do not. You are not sure you were there for that glorious past they are always talking about.

They have a very boring job or they are a stay-at-home parent. They want to be your “best internet friend.” They want to talk to you all the time. They “like” all your statuses, profile pictures and all the links you post. They retweet you all the time, and they add your boyfriend or girlfriend on Facebook. They send you a message every few days to “ask how your week is going.” They Gchat you to see if you had fun at that party Facebook said you attended. They don’t know that they’re annoying the crap out of you. Or else they don’t care.

via Rawiya Kameir

People Who Promote Their Family

These people tend to be parents that have just joined Facebook, at last, after they spent a couple years slowly coming to grips with the concept, and then spent a few additional months wondering if joining would alienate/embarrass their children. Finally they joined, and their profile picture is of them out to a “big occasion dinner” with their kids. Or they are at a tourist attraction with their husband or wife, and in these cases the photo seems to subtly say, “See, we’re not that old, we can still hike!” But, in many cases—and these are the cases that are more embarrassing and unfortunate to see—people who promote their family can be young people that married at a bizarrely young age, or got knocked up, or have an older sibling that just had a child, so they’re now a young aunt or uncle. In these cases their first twenty tagged photos are of them cradling their spouse/child/nephew/niece and trying to tell you, essentially, “Check me out, I’m a loving person that loves my family members, they love me back, I’m all grown up now y’all.” The (adult) people who promote their family do not have Twitter. They might have LinkedIn, though they probably do not because on LinkedIn they cannot promote their family as easily. The (young) people who promote their family (say, under 30) do use Twitter, mostly to tweet about what they are up to with their family this weekend (hint: apple-picking!) or to retweet their younger brother, who is even younger, still a teen, not yet a person who promotes his family, so his tweets are quick hits about music like “Man I love that new Kanye song Runaway, the video is siiiick!” The (young) people who promote their family also use Facebook to post photos of them drinking with the family at a family holiday event, with captions like “Me, Suzie, Sally, and Sammy taking a birthday shot with mom and dad, love you mom and dad!”

via Daniel Roberts

People Who Write Yelp Reviews

Full disclosure: I use Yelp a few times a week. Whether it’s for researching a restaurant, finding the right doctor or checking out a reliable neighborhood drug dealer (J/K on that last one. I wish), the website has been extremely helpful and a welcome addition to my life. That being said, I don’t think I will ever write a Yelp review. Nope. Not ever. It takes a certain type of person to write a Yelp review and I don’t think I have it or want to have it. Yelpers, as they’re so affectionately referred to, are the types of people who are know-it-alls. They’re the friends you have who share their opinions on everything, solicited or not. They believe that they have the best taste in music, film, food, everything. If they have a soggy taco at the neighborhood Mexican restaurant, they act horrified and think it’s their duty to inform the masses of their lackluster dining experience. Some people use Yelp only to write bad reviews. They’re like Ben Stiller’s character in Greenberg, always writing complaint letters to whoever they feel has wronged them. It’s another example of the Internet giving everyone too much of a voice. But I suppose I’m being hypocritical here seeing as how I’ve been dissuaded from going somewhere based on a bad Yelp review. However, I always keep in mind that the person giving the bad review about Jamaican Me Crazee might have just had a bad day or might be one of those cynical assholes who works at an independent record store.

via Ryan O'Connell

People Who Take Shit Seriously

These people are usually women in their late 20s or early 30s who spend a good portion of their day, every day, trolling the Internet looking for things to be upset about. These Womyn will engage in lengthy arguments in the comments sections of magazine blogs, and will type a lot of words, and quote a lot of quotes that don’t really make any sort of clear point other than, “I don’t know how to work my own life.” They will become frenzied over such topics as: hipsters, middle class people, lower income people, and gluten. If you were to say something funny about a homeless lady you saw once, they’d totes block you like this (finger snap noise.)

via Kelly McClure

Putting “113°” in giant, bold, red font at the top of its homepage, Huffington Post has done a massive job of sensationalizing/ making us very afraid of Los Angeles’ insane heatwave that broke the record for hottest downtown temperature ever.

To be fair, it does seem bleak. Temperature in downtown LA hit 113 degrees yesterday, which somehow caused the power to go out for 30,000 Californians, as well as water problems for 5,400.

Over on the east coast, four people, including a child, were killed in a shooting this morning in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood. Police haven’t arrested anyone yet. After the shooting, one woman was reported as having wailed “why” loudly while onlookers attempted to comfort her.

South of the border, Associated Press is reporting that a hillside has recently collapsed on top of a town in southern Mexico, near Oaxaca. Oaxaca’s governor, Ulises Ruiz, has announced that “100 to 300 houses and speculated that 500 to 1,000 people could be dead.”

“We were all sleeping and all I heard was a loud noise and when I left the house I saw that the hill had fallen,” Vargas said,” a town official said.

Gustavo Sanchez, the mayor of Morelia, another place in Mexico, was recently stoned to death. His aide received the same fate. They were found on Monday by Mexican police.

In a tragic and very ironic turn of events, the owner of Segway, Inc. Jimi Heselden lost control of his Segway and drove it off a cliff and into a river. He died. Aside from owning Segway, Inc., Heselden had donated over 23 million GBP to charitable causes during his lifetime.

Finally, something bad happened at UT Austin this morning. The AP reported that there was a “shooting” while Gawker reported that a man committed suicide with an AK-47 on the sixth floor of the library.

“I was walking from the business school, and a guy sprinted past me screaming, ‘There’s a guy with a gun.’ I looked up and saw a man in a ski mask, wearing a suit, and carrying an assault rifle. And I called 911,” said a UT Austin student.

Gawker additionally noted that tonight, “a coalition of conservative and libertarian groups on the UT campus tonight ‘will be hosting John Lott, famed defender of gun rights and author of the book ‘More Guns, Less Crime’.”

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