I am weirdly almost happy that I got bedbugs (I’m not really) because my dad left me this townhouse that is great (in that it’s nearly free and quite close to DC) but was in terrible condition in terms of being full of crap and dusty as fuck and every single inch of wall needs to be painted. I’ve been here for a few…

I’m not even at a place where I can afford all-new furniture, but I STILL got rid of everything except one IKEA chair on which everything can be laundered and the frame taken apart for inspection. The extermination costs $1,200, and while all-new furniture for my whole townhouse is going to cost more than that, I’d…

Weirdly, I DO have bedbugs (my second treatment is this week and hopefully by the end of this month I will not have bedbugs anymore) and this makes me feel a bit better about my life, too. Bedbugs are embarrasing, but they really can happen to anyone.

I have to agree. I’ve HAD a dog like this, but due to my living situation I was able to keep him away from other people with near 100% accuracy. Having a dog like that that needs to be walked in a busy city and live in an apartment building full of other people just seems like a recipe for disaster

Do not do it with a hetero couple. Every couple I ever tried it with treated me more like a sex toy they were bringing to bed than a person, and one of them was usually participating reluctantly, to boot. Love yourself and steer clear.

My only personal rule about threesomes (gained from experience) is that the other two people both have to be the same gender. I don’t care about which gender it is, but they both have to be it. All the worst sex I’ve ever had in my life has been with another woman and a man, because there’s just a thousand ways it can…

The Saudification of Islam in Muslim countries is a very interesting topic that I wish more academic work would be written about. Having lived in a Muslim country (Sudan) in which (in the cities at least) about a third of the women, mostly the young, wear regular Western dress adapted for the culture, a third, mostly…

This is great. I have a mild phobia of man-made things under water (like, it mostly just makes fear run up my spine like a good horror movie) and shipwrecks are particularly good for triggering it. So now next time I want to be frightened but don’t want to sit through a 90 minute film, I know where to look.

I just wish Popeye’s would branch out to other countries more quickly. I’ve never eaten KFC in America, but I’ve eaten it a bunch when I was overseas and had few other options. There was a weird time in Prague where for almost half a year it seemed like all the grocery stores, of all the different companies, simply…

I haven’t had the toolbar button since I had to reboot my computer from a backup more than a year ago, and reaching out to Pocket support staff was ignored. As for there being other apps for the other stuff, I am aware, as the main content of my comment was telling you about one of them.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned growing up is that actually, no one else has anything I want.

I’m going to name my future son after a friend who has a very cool name, but who I’m not close enough to that he could ever actually disappoint me. That’s the plan so far, at least.

I actually think it’ll be tough through grade school and nothing at all after that. Teddy Roosevelt had a son called Kermit! He’s in good company! Basically he just has to wait for his peers to age out of knee-jerk cruelty and it’ll be fine.

I got fed up with Pocket when they got rid of the toolbar button that let you access your bookmarks list and added new bookmarks with one click, and I had to start dedicating a tab to having their dumb website open all the time, as well as having to copy/paste URLs to save. I’ve since gone over to Evernote, which…

That does kind of make the “stripper name” argument not make sense, doesn’t it? I remember reading somewhere (probably on Jezebel, years ago) that if you plot the characteristics of all porn stars, the “average” porn star is like 5'6", has brown hair, and is named Nikki. Ever since I read that, Nikki is the only porn…

To be fair, the mistake there was not yours, but your father’s, either for keeping the story secret or for sticking with the name. He could have done one of those things, or the other, but he fucked up by trying to do both.

and the -kensies. At least 25% of children are called some variant spelling of Mackensie these days.

I’ve always been glad my adoptive parents chose not to change my birth name, which is both serviceable and suitable, mostly because my mother’s choices to change it were either Rachel (so I could have been one of twenty thousand Rachels in every group) or Aurora, which is so princessy and saccharine it makes me gag.

Your dad’s lucky. I know a girl whose mother almost died giving birth to her, like she was in a literal coma for days, so it fell to her father to fill out all the birth forms. And so the girl became Erinn-with-two-n’s, a name that the parents had never discussed and which was either a momentary whim of the husband’s…

Lol, a friend’s mom started work at a daycare a few years ago, and the other teachers almost immediately pointed out this one boy as an absolute hellraiser. Friend’s mom figured out why he was such a terror pretty quickly, when she heard one of the teachers yelling at “Seen.”