Things We Saw Today: A Commenting Malfunction

Hey! We don’t really have a funny picture up here today because we need to adress some serious business. Our commenting system, Disqus, seems to have banned a whole bunch of people that we didn’t ask it to. Including one of our own writers! We want to let everyone know that these bans were not intentional, and we’re working to iron out the problems. At the moment we don’t exactly know what’s wrong, but it appears we are not the only site affected. On the other hand, other sites in our home network like Geekosystem are not having these problems. So it’s left us looking something like the picture above. We’re sure that it’s also left some of you like the picture above and we apologize for the inconvenience. We don’t hate you!

In the meantime, if:

• You find that you are blocked

And:

• You were not spamming

And:

• You had not shown a history of making personal attacks against our writers or otherwise being a jerk (we will notice)

Then please send us an email with your username, make sure the subject line is “TMS, Y U Ban Me?” just in case there turns out to be something that we can do about it.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled Things We Saw Today.

TL;DR, if you got commentbanned today, you should probably email us. This lovely TL;DR was found on Reddit, via Neatorama.

More recent research includes Angela Thomas’ work, which found that writing fanfiction allowed young women to create empowering narratives that let them feel more powerful in their everyday lives. She also found the sense of community writers got from fanfic was important, especially for teenagers who might otherwise feel excluded in their peer group.

Canadian Paulette Rothbauer’s research found that some lesbian and queer youth find role models in slash fanfiction, which some found particularly important at a time of life when they may feel alone and unsupported.

Looking at another way fanfic challenges conventional gender relations, Melissa at The High Hat speculates that women writing about male slash pairings is a way for authors to “have the freedom of being male in their female bodies.”— Jarrah Hodge in her article Fanfic is Underrated which you should totally read at Bitch Magazine.

Holy crap check out this eye makeup. And it’s part of a gallery of other Disney (yes, yes, TNBC was Paramount, which is owned by Disney) movies, at The Gloss.

What reason could Alan Turing have had for suicide? Biographers have speculated that he may have killed himself due to lingering medical problems relating to the medication that he had been forced to take. Again, though, he gave no sign that any residual side effects had remained by the time of his death. There was also speculation about the possibility of blackmail or simply his increasing awareness of how his homosexuality was viewed by the government that he had helped to win World War II. By 1950, intelligence agencies in the United States and the United Kingdom had singled out homosexuals as representing a security threat. As the Cold War intensified, a loose cannon like Alan Turing seemed unacceptable and even his informal consulting work with government agencies was ended. If anything, he was fortunate to die when he did given the massive witchhunts of the later fifties and early sixties which led to the purging of suspected homosexuals from most Western governments.

— Providentia‘s extensive article on the prosecution and punishment of cryptographer supreme Alan Turing for making the “mistake” of being homosexual in England in the 1950s, and his subsequent death. A very informative read.

This is a banjo that you can buy on, where else, Etsy, in Paul Celantano’s store.