Allyson, Excel will do it for you, easy peasy.

Mine is pretty clearly Intergalactic by a country parsec. I'm not a huge fan, but that song is anthemic.

The Montreal Comedy Festival was...funny. And not just like that. They'd have an "Uptown" show every year, which was lampshaded as black folk, but they also tossed in the odd Maori. Completely shameless. Some black comedians transcended uptown--Dave Chappelle, Bill Bellamy, Steve Harvey, but they all at least performed the Uptown show.

And there weren't that many black women around behind the scenes of the festival, so they all noticed me. So I got shenanigans every year. Some of the shenanigans were the cool fun kind, and those primarily have Chappelle stamped across them, but then there are your Davidsons, your Sinbads, your Mike Epps. I was tasked to go forth from On The Spot and report back on the ways of the randy black American every year.

Good times, good times.

The guys at the restaurant in the other building in the office complex laugh at me when I buy two or three muffins every day I buy any, but that means with my partial work schedule I can still have a morningstar for breakfast every day, even if I don't come into the office five days a week. And for dinner, from time to time also.

LeN, Nick Denton said that he wanted it to be harder for you to read all the comments. So, he's succeeded admirably. Fucking asshole. I don't mind dropping jez, gawker, giz and lifehacker, but I'm reading less than half as much of IO9 articles (I'm as active in the general topic forum as before--but there's no editorial content there, nor ads), and I'm bitter about that. If you read with Chrome or Firefox, one of the kotaku readers wrote a plugin that restores the earlier reading metaphor, if you're interested: [link] Since I'm an Opera user, I'm out in the cold from both official site support and friendly hackers, so I only crack open Chrome and peek at the articles a few times a day. The general topic forum hasn't significantly changed format.

Nick Denton said that he wanted it to be harder for you to read all the comments.

What is his reasoning behind that? "Goddamn commenters, how dare they actually comment!"?

I remember an article about him discussing the shittness of internet comment sections and how to make things better, and he had no good solutions.

[link]

There are some awesome sites for comments, but they're rare, because they're heavily moderated and that takes a lot of time. Ta-Nehesi Coates manages his comments well, and if he can't be around, just shuts down commenting.

Consuela, if you have Netflix streaming, they offer Foyle's, as well.

We started watching Island at War last night, and though it has much the same look as Foyle's, and Saskia Reeves, Philip Glenister and Joanne Froggat (from Downton) in the cast, it was apparent it was much grittier and dark, in spite of the gentle English sunshine. We opted for more S4 SG:1. We can endure hardship and cheese, confident things will work out in the end, and save the unresolved angst for another evening.

Yeah, I get Amazon Prime, but not Netflix streaming. Amazon works fine for me.

Just had an unpleasant phone call with my folks. ARGH. I need to get my mother a new psychiatrist, but she refuses to go see them or then lies to them about her mental state (or willfully refuses to remember her condition, anything is possible).

I just read this really great essay by a dude who went from an ultra-orthodox jewish school to public school, and his first crush on a girl, and how difficult it was to go from "you cannot even look at girls" to, "is it ok if I kiss you?" when he was 16.

Really lovely piece. And half the comments are a few people calling him a shitty waste of space writer. You know what? You don't actually NEED a comments section at your online magazine. You just don't. If you have quality, interesting pieces, people will come and read them.

Feedback forms are fine. Sure, nut jobs will still write asshole shit to you, but you cut out the waste products who are only there to troll. Trolling is no fun if you can't even be sure your troll reached the target.

You guys, the tart I just made is fucking delicious. This soft cheese business, leeks, and lemon basil from my CSA, plus egg and crust. Now I want to eat the whole thing! That was not the plan.

so, I get that Internet commenting is in complete and utter disarray generally. But I am questioning the aims and the points now.

Some comments DO show up. So how do they show up? Is it based on a ratings system? How can we rate posts if we can't see them. Just disable commenting if you are working at cross-purposes. It is too much work for the results you get.

Jesse,

you must share with all the buffistas. this is how things work.

The gawker sites were, by and large, exceptions to the 'don't read the comments' rule (every single time I went to kotaku it was a display of pre-MRA male privilege whining, but there was distinct selection bias taking place in determining what caught my attention). Over 50% of the point of any given article on their main sites was the commenting--when they shut commenting down on gawker.com for the initial transition over to "powwow" (the first, really awful version of the software) pageviews dipped lower than their normal seasonal fluctuations would have predicted. Which makes sense--why would anyone click on an article twice anymore? But I'm not sure what the unique views numbers were like.

The tone of the articles have changed (not as much on IO9, but markedly on gawker and jezebel, IMO), and they've had waves of trolls (it's easier to get an account--if you want a legit account, it's more involved, since you need to tie it to google+, fb, or twitter, but you can get a burner account that's not tied to shit, and has slightly curtailed posting rights (no pictures--that was a quick amendment after the initial burst of kiddie porn from 4chan) trivially easily, and at the very least gawker, jez, and io9 (but thankfully much less) have had problems. Mods also have less control from an admin point of view. They can't move posts out of articles anymore--individual posters can move comments away from replying to them, but they stay on the article--in fact, they bump up to root level, instead of being nested under you--it's counter intuitive/productive/BLARGH--and they can't ban people anymore.

It's just so deeply stupid. Denton touted first powwow and now kinja like he had a revolutionary understanding of web community and monetizing comments that no one else had ever grasped before, but...it has yet to play out. He's basically CalGal with angel investors.

The first basic premise--no banning, no moving--has given trolls a funner playground than ever before.

The second basic premise--you can't scan root level comments without one click per comment --means that people don't read all or even many of the comments before they post. Sure, people weren't reading most, but not reading many? Any? Means there's lots of repetition, and less conversation. There's a magic algorithm that's supposed to affect which threads are pushed to the front of the pile (Denton spins it like that's key to manipulating the environment and marketing the...the whatever), but all we've been able to determine so far is that if you're logged in, your stuff seems to float to the top of your view--yay?

The third basic premise--outsource security, or basically dispense with it--they had a very badly handled password oops a while back, and decided they weren't equipped to protect anyone's credentials, so they'd let people who were doing it anyway take care of it. This rattled a lot of people who don't have one of these accounts, or don't want any link, no matter how hidden (they say it will never be evident which FB/G+ account is tied to which gawker account name) between identities. It's a really buggy implementation, which will log you out on half the page, and have you logged in on the other half--obviously you're logged out on the half where you're trying to post, and support is all about the "delete all the cookies, flush all the cache" school of troubleshooting. On the flip side, Denton wants to be a haven for whistle blowing and insider secrets, ergo the "burner account". This is totally anonymous, not tied to anything. Limited, as noted before--you can't post pictures, you can't have spaces in your user name (I dunno), and it uses a "key" instead of a password. And there's no recovering--you lose the key, you're locked out forever, and the account is dead dead dead. And Denton seems to think that this way he will get his very own RDJ spilling Hollywood's inside secrets, or maybe his sights are set on Scientology. It's hard to tell--he's a very ambitious man.