Questions of the Week

1. Do you feel that children are becoming more aggressive?
Added by: Dinosore

2. Is your first response to art intellectual or emotional?
Added by: chips2001

3. Do you find that taking a shower is more relaxing or energizing?
Added by: pinkbottle

4. Would you rather vote for Stephen Colbert than either of the current presidential candidates?
Added by: starflame

5. If you aren't sure how to pronounce a word, do you avoid using it?
Added by: HaroldtheBat

1. What breed of cat are you?
Added by: chocobar

2. What natural disaster are you?
Added by: smurf3

3. Which Narnia Character are You?
Added by: methehuman

4. Tim Burton Quiz
Added by: ColorMeLazy

5. What career are you destined to have?
Added by: IASockPuppet

Funniest Comments of the Week

In a thread about 9/11 conspiracy theories:
handys003: Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard has accused America of fabricating the 9/11 attacks.


yellowDog: What do mermaids know?

In a thread about what kind of graveyard shift jobs there are:
killyr.idols: Cat burglar?
chips2001: You don't need to steal them. Amy's giving them away.

From Kiki's thread concerned about the front page:
EhFahQ: She is refering to this thread: [link] bumped after 13 days of being dead.
thh: That's better than Jesus.
Abzurd: But less than Keith Richards.

From Hanna-xo’s journal entitled 'soooo' :
Hannah-xo: gooe for you, acyully i have loads of friends and a few celeb
Cindy_: I'm literate. I win.
Hannah-xo: your what?

In the Gossip thread:
S916Dave: I heard Rik braids his nose hairs!
tamahau: You braid your arse hairs old man. With your teeth.
Sammy: Dave is more flexible than I recall...
PoppinCorks: Unless he takes the teeth out to do it...

Joke of the Week

Bathtub

During a visit to the mental asylum, a visitor asked the Director how you determine whether or not a patient should be institutionalized.

'Well,' said the Director, 'we fill up a bathtub, then we offer a teaspoon, a teacup and a bucket to the patient and ask him or her to empty the bathtub.'

'Oh, I understand,' said the visitor. 'A normal person would use the bucket because it's bigger than the spoon or the teacup.'

'No.' said the Director, 'A normal person would pull the plug. Do you want a bed near the window?'

Member of the Week

The member of the week is StubbyTorso2. A member since August 2004, Stubby recently finished in second place (to former MOTW Snowbdr88) in the latest YT assassin game. She outlasted 46 other players, killing off four herself. Congrats!

JoeInterview's Member Feature

This week's interview features flovebunny. This interview was conducted by travbowman.

JoeInterview: First off, how did you find YT?

flovebunny: I'm an i-a-b transplant. I visited that site well before I created this handle, and I'd be blissfully perusing links, when the little box for YT with a question would pop up on the left. I would answer yes/no questions for a few minutes before being prodded to sign up, with which I couldn't be bothered.

I finally broke down and created flovebunny, though, then started trying to add my own questions, which always got rejected, of course, and posting comments at i-a-b enough to get people commenting "why does this flove girl only post in links?" That's when I stumbled into the forums.

JI: What's the biggest reason you keep coming back for more?

FB: Oh, you know. In college, it was a way to decompress and take a break from studying, or at least taking a break from freaking out about the lack of studying I did. I attended the College of William and Mary which is a small school but notorious for its rigorous curriculum and students that don't know how to just cut loose. Youthink was my way to cut loose during the schoolweek.

Then when I'd be home for summers I'd come back to a tiny southeastern Virginia city, which didn't have much in the way of nightlife. So I'd wait 'til everyone in my house was in bed, then I'd log on to YT and stay up for hours. In a way, Youthink was my only constant companion as I'd shuffle from home to college, and then eventually when I made my big move out to the midwest, too.

JI: What did you study at William and Mary?

FB: East Asian studies. I took three years of Japanese and still speak it embarrassingly poorly. My favorite parts of the degree were the anthropology and pop culture classes. It was a way for me to soak up the culture of China and Japan, because studying abroad was out of the question; I had to have a part time job and I eventually became the RA of my dorm. Senior year, I developed tastes for different studies, like Journalism, biological anthropology and theatre- I was in a production my last semester of college. And, like a lot of students, once I was 21, I became an avid scholar of bar crawling culture.

JI: What brought you to Indiana after college?

FB: I visited Indiana in May, not thinking I would like it very much. An East Coast brat, I associated Indiana with silos and cornfields. I was amazed by the town I eventually moved to. It was this gorgeous hybrid of sophistication and unpretentiousness- it had a nightlife, ethnic restaurants, an ecologically minded "hippie" community...so different from where I grew up, and where I went to college. I decided to put moving to New York on hold and accepted a short term position at the university in town.

I've lived here now for a year. I've gotten involved with the community, built up my resume with two positions and found out a lot about myself. A return to the East coast is in order next summer, maybe somewhere south after the excruciating Indiana winters, or maybe New York, but I don't regret my decision to move here, at all.

JI: What's your main draw to New York?

FB: Oh man...I could go on for ages about this! I was lucky enough to have a relative living on Manhattan, so my exposure to the city was early enough to leave a deep impression on my soft and still-forming personal preferences and sense of self. At five, I remember spilling chocolate ice cream on my shirt while sitting on a bench in Central Park, at eleven, I wore a baseball cap backwards while cheering behind home plate at Yankees stadium. At thirteen I was allowed around the city on my own during my now-annual summer visits- hot and sweaty walks up and down the East side, near the river, through the Whitney, I wondered to myself, why do people think New Yorkers are rude. I found them to be the salt of the earth.

At fifteen I woke up in the morning to the sound of shopkeepers hosing down the sidewalks on my relatives block, and at that moment I knew I loved New York as much as I could ever love any city, and vowed to live there one day. At twenty I took a bike ride all around the island, and, coasting around the gentle slope of Battery Park with the sun in my eyes , I knew this was as close to heaven as I'd ever get (sore butt from the bike aside)

And, during my latest visit, I'm finally confident enough to call myself a pro at the subway, have made jaunts out to other boroughs into Astoria and Williamsburg, got a subscription to New York magazine, and on the roof of my relative's apartment, looked out at the horizon as far as I could without all the high rise apartments getting in the way, and dreamed of my future as a magazine editor in the best city in the world.

JI: What's the story behind your username?

FB: It was a fake AIM screenname I'd give out to boys I'd meet at parties Freshman year, and didn't want to talk to them. Everyone in college would have AIM on 24/7 and leave away messages that were supposedly glimpses into their souls...anyway, I didn't have a cell phone at the time, so it was the way to get a hold of me.

I think when I first joined I tried to post intelligently (lurking in generals taught me to do nothing otherwise!) but with a hint of flirtatiousness, and bubbliness, but I let that go...like one of my favorite writers Douglas Coupland says, if you create an online alternate persona, that persona eventually becomes you. and that's exactly what happened.

I love how the name lends itself to all sorts of neat variations; the ones I've liked best are flovebungee, floverly, flovesy..a bunch of others.

JI: Describe Coupland's works to the uninitiated.

FB: Everyone should read Coupland! I think he's the person who coined the term "Generation X" and has a novel by the same title. He's also written Microserfs (my favorite) All Families are Psychotic, Miss Wyoming, Jpod, among others. The writing is geeky, intimate and real. I bring him up every chance I get in the Lit forum!

JI: What music has been getting the most spin from you lately?

FB: A lot of Indie stuff. I don't buy a lot of CDs, but as an editor of an alternative culture publication, I get a lot of promos in the mail. I'm friends with a few college radio DJs and they influence my taste in music a lot; the college radio station here in town is excellent.

Actually, Cheese King and I have a gazillion PMs where we share music with one another, and he's turned me on to a lot of stuff too. I hope I've let him in on some good stuff, but he tends to sway toward folk and bluegrass more than me.

The Pandora algorithm is always helpful as well. I'd say the top ten bands and such for me would be Hot Chip, Daft Punk, Justice, The Epochs, The Spin Doctors, Andrew Bird, Margot and the Nuclear So and Sos, Feist, Why? and They Might Be Giants.

JI: Name an artist that gets a ton of play by the indie and college radio stations whose hype you just don't get.

FB: I really don't get the overly hipster stuff, including the "British brats" like Uffie and her ilk. So many indie kids just listen to whatever pitchfork or their hipster websites tell them to, and I just want to shake them, because then they just cop an attitude when no one's heard of their "obscure" (but not really) music. Thankfully I haven't met TOO many of these.

Also I get really annoyed when someone will name drop a band or mention a song I don't know, so I ask about it and they give me this look, like "You don't know X?!" This happens a lot with Classic Rock. It's not like I haven't heard it, I just haven't gone out of my way to memorize it! I generally listen to what I like and don't try to appear like an expert on anything.

JI: So what do you consider yourself an expert on (music or otherwise) ?

FB: I can hula hoop indefinitely. I'm good at copy editing for my publication; when it counts, I can spot errors. I also bartended for a year so I know how to make most cocktails and can appreciate good liquor. Animals seem to get along with me, too. But I wouldn't boast on being an expert on anything.

JI: When you're out, what's your drink of choice?

FB: I'm trying to branch out. My latest project is building a taste for Campari. So occasionally I'll have that, with a little club soda and orange juice. Tonight I'm having a Long Island, sometimes I mix those up with Long Beaches. I'll take a bourbon straight up, I really like that, too. A classic stand by for me however, is a Cape Codder, which is merely vodka, cranberry juice and a lime wedge.

JI: Your profile lists you as dating. How did you and your significant other meet?

FB: Oh, men... these are always the tricky questions! I try not to bring "real life" people into my conversations with people on YT because I just don't think it's fair to the other person. Let me just say that I spent the bulk of college in a long distance "we're going to get married as soon as we graduate" type relationship that went sour the summer before my senior year. I can't believe how much time I wasted worrying about that person. Since then I've been skittish about the m-word and over-the-top proclamations of affection, but I'm currently very happy.

JI: What about the reverse- - do you ever talk about YT to any real life folks?

FB: Oh my goodness, no. I've expressed excitement to close friends about becoming a moderator on a forum I've been on for years, but never any specifics. One YTer actually submits to the publication I work for, so everyone there knows about that person- - by the non-YT name! My gerbils are always giving me dirty looks if I'm up on YT too late, does that count?

JI: Oooh, are you allowed to say which YTer has had stuff published by your publication?

FB: It's Cheese King. He has a really effortlessly witty style; his writing reminds me a lot of Mark Twain's. We became friends way back in my first year here, bonding over and debating different types of literature.

JI: Which piece of literature do you two view the most differently? In other words, what piece just he just not get the way you do, and vice versa?

FB: That would have to be "Heart of Darkness." I really can't stand it, nor do I put up with a lot of Conrad in general. Cheese likes it enough that I think he made it the book of the month for the now defunct YT book club. I keep trying to get him to read Mrs. Dalloway, but I doubt if he has yet.

JI: What is your relationship with your parents like?

FB: Difficult. Better with my dad, but we're not as close as we once were. My parents had me when they were very young, so I get the feeling neither of them every got a chance to fully grow up; I have a few younger siblings too. They believed in corporal punishment, something I took in stride as a kid, but getting into my teens I really resented it. I was the first person in our family to go to college, but even after I left, they'd threaten to "pull me out." if they were upset with me. After I graduated, my parents accused me of being uptight and unaffectionate; I do keep my distance emotionally, but still try to maintain a good relationship with them. I still get frustrated and angry sometimes about things that happened as a kid. I'm glad I'm independent, and my younger siblings will sometimes call for advice; I just tell them to try and not take the bait.

JI: What do you think is the most positive thing you've gained from your relationship with your family?

FB: I've learned patience, restraint, and tolerance. When you're a teenager you have this overwhelming urge to do nothing but show contempt for your parents if that's what you're feeling. For some reason, once I hit adulthood, it all sort of mellowed. When my mom will start to nag me or whatever, before I start to jump into something I'm going to regret, I'm able to calmly diffuse the situation; I think this skill has helped us have a more or less pleasant relationship since I was about nineteen.

I've been able to use this in other situations; whenever I'm stressed at work or with something else, I can sort of emotionally detach from it until I've solved the problem or it has gone away. I think I'll always have the strongest relationships with my siblings, especially my sister that's closest in age to me. We all have these inside jokes with each other, and every time we're all home for Christmas or anything, it's very uproarious and merry, being around them.

JI: Let's say Buddy sells YT to you for a dollar. What the first thing you change about the site?

FB: I know I'm supposed to say "let us de-yellow envelopes," right? Besides that, I'm a supporter of bringing the YT baby back in the upper left, and also those crazy-awesome golden keys we used to have. Those were the days, no?

JI: Whose posts from the days of YT yore do you miss the most?

FB: Where's tangledlace_ ? She was always so interesting with her posts. I remember talking a lot with her and junkiedrunk when I was still new here. We're facebook friends, but I can never find an excuse to message her there and strike up another conversation. But, you know, YTers come, and go, then come back again. I was gone for almost six months once, but I'll never REALLY leave, I don't think.

JI: Any final words of wisdom to share with your fellow YTers?

FB: Final words? YT continues to rile, titillate and engage me each year with its motley crue of personalities you can count on equally for a piece of sound advice or a scathing noob bashing. Don't ever change. (But like you would!)

Also while we're all in Real Life, happiness tends to trump being right all the time- go for that, as long as it's not at the expense of others!

This week's article is titled 'Touched by an angel? Most say they've been protected', and the thread was posted by snowbdr88.

This week's link is titled 'Internet For The Blind', and the link was posted by ColorMeLazy.

Best Avatar of the Week	Best Profile Design of the Week
immortal_1	"Rawpower" by Benjakebub9

Featured Article of the Week

The Escaped
Excerpt: She came back just as soon as she left. After only a few seconds she remembered her location. A grin slowly came over her face as she rolled over in bed and faced her lover. " How'd you sleep?" She asked in a sleepy voice.

Written by Macora

Check it all out at YouThink.com!