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Saturday Night Scary Movie Open Thread

All right kids. The Grand Inquisitor has to go out for a little adult fun tonight so she can have a little drink and forget about this week’s unpleasantness. Now go upstairs and put on your jammies before the sitter gets here. I expect you all to be on your best behavior. Since you have all been so good this week, you can stay up and watch a scary movie.
This is possibly the worst horror movie ever made. It is called “Blood on Satan’s Claw” and it was made in 1971. The little GI decided to watch it when she was a wee lass and her parents were out for the evening. She did not sleep well for weeks. You might want to watch it with the lights on.

I will check on you when I get home to clear the monsters out from under the bed.
Also, snark aside, one more thanks for being so understanding and downright helpful this week. Have a great night.

Saturday Evening Post (Get it)

Well my friends, we are struggling to get ourselves back to normal, and I think we are doing pretty well. Glad to see all of you and hope we won’t ever be separated like that again.
The Grand Inquisitor needs to take a nap now, but she will leave you a channel of cute animal vids to delight you while she is resting.

Have a great evening, and thank you all for your incredible support and patience the last couple of days.

Dear Leader Speaks

By now many of you are already aware of what happened when our site went down for about a day and a half. On Thursday afternoon Gizmodo linked to one of our posts, and we instantly got a huge spike in traffic. And while I had previously predicted the need to move to a better hosting solution, we couldn’t have predicted that this would happen. Because we were still using an inexpensive shared hosting plan, when all that Gizmodo traffic came our way we suddenly exceeded our allotted percentage of the server’s resources and they suspended our account.

Right away we moved to a much better (and more expensive) virtual server, but unfortunately our old host’s backup of our database was badly corrupted. Thanks to the legendary heroism of your fellow Crasstalker Bens, we were able to save all the data and get the site back up. From now on we should have a much faster website with fewer annoying bugs and less downtime. This will be a big improvement in how Crasstalk performs.

We think this is a huge opportunity for us to continue growing this community. Here’s what you can do to help us do that:

  • Share Crasstalk links on Facebook,  Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc. All you have to do is hit one of the social media buttons at the bottom of each article.
  • Join the Crasstalk Facebook Group.
  • If you haven’t already, make a donation to our site fund. See the button on the right? Yeah, that one.
  • If you’re an author, start writing new articles again. We’re going to need them!
  • Go find articles mentioning the Gawker redesign and post comments with links to the site in them. That’s how many of you found this place, so keep spreading the word.

I’ll tell you right now, DogsOfWar, GrandInquisitor and I have big plans for this place. We’re working on improving the quality level of the articles. We’re making the site faster. And we’re working on adding new features like PMs, Gawker-style reply notifications and chat. This recent setback has made us more, not less, committed to improving the site.

Stay snarky.

 

PhotoPhriday: May the Phorce Be With You

A long time ago, on a web site far, far down in page views, a group of rebel commenters won an early victory against the evil Dentonian Empire. Breaking the fourth wall, they began sharing personal photos, first of their homes, then of themselves. As the Death Gawk imploded, crushed under the weight of a giant Trident ad, the rebels fled to far corners of the Internet, finding safe harbor on a host planet, Crasstalk. A new hope was born, and with it, an urge to strengthen the alliance through photo sharing.

That’s right kids, on both counts: I’m a closet nerd and it is PhotoPhriday! Tonight’s theme: geeking out. What makes you a nerd? Something you read? Something you collect? What are you currently geeking out over?

Uploading pictures takes a simple Jedi mind trick, since there is no insert picture option in WordPress.

Just follow these helpful tips, adapted from previous PhotoPhriday instructions:

  • This is the magic computer code you use to make pictures appear: [img src=”PHOTO URL HERE”]. NOTE: Replace the brackets with the carrots < >.
  • And it’s a URL, not photo file.  Crasstalk doesn’t accept files from your hard drive – only from the Internet. You can upload your photo to Facebook, Flickr, TinyPic, or any other online photo hosting site to generate a URL for the photo.
  • Also, be sure to add a few words of text with your picture so it doesn’t get tripped up in the site’s spam filter.
  • To pick up an image online, right click (or ctrl-click on a Mac) on an image of Carrie Fisher When She Was Hot and select “View Image.” Copy-and-paste the URL and plug it into the img src html code.
  • To upload the picture of Carrie Fisher When She Was Hot you found, this is what you type (again, replacing the brackets with the greater than and less than symbols < >):

[img src=”http://www.2dorks.com/gallery/2009/0924-bikini/bikini04.jpg”]

So hop to it, nerds! Show us your shame.

Wake Up Wednesday Open Thread

Morning Dear, time to get up. No, you can’t have ten more minutes. Get in the shower and get going. You don’t want to miss the bus.
Here are a couple cute bunneh videos to make the world seem kinder at this ungodly hour.

There. Isn’t that better. Have a great day.

Tuesday Night Open Thread

Hope you had a great day. Last week, we posted some of our favorite weird articles from the wonderful world of Wikipedia. I thought I’d post a few more for your late night amusement.

The Boston Molasses Disaster. Nice to know corporate incompetence has such a long tradition in America.

Captain Midnight. Best tax protest, evar.

The Beaumont Children. Three Australian children who disappeared without a trace in 1966. A fascinating cold case.

Have a great night.