You are my moon and my stars.
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
What Audiobooks Should Everyone Listen To At Least Once?
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Help us find the best.
Audiobooks are perfect for those times you don't want to/can't read an actual book, but want to keep your mind busy.
You think she's dancing to music, but really she just got to the good part in Outlander.
But it can be harder to find a good audiobook than a good book. Not only does the story have to hook you, the narrator must also knock your socks off.
Sometimes a celebrity narrator gets it right, but more often than not it's a narrator you're unfamiliar with who just nails it.
Audible
So tell us in the comments below, which audiobooks are absolute must-listens, and why?
Cartoon Network
J.K. Rowling Has Written A New Backstory On The Dursleys
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 24, 2015
The latest Pottermore release offers new insight into Petunia and Vernon Dursley’s daily lives.
Warner Bros.
On Tuesday, Pottermore released the seventh installment of its interactive guide to the Harry Potter series.
Pottermore / Via pottermore.com
The release features 14 illustrated moments from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, as well as five new pieces from Rowling.
This Is What Happens When You Reply To Tinder Guys As Christian Grey
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 24, 2015
The Kids Version Of "Fight Club" Is Everything You Want For Your Child
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Rule one: You DON’T talk about Horsing Around Club.
Mashable got Fight Club author, Chuck Palahniuk, to present a child-friendly version of his book, and it's absolutely amazing.
FOX
19 Things Everyone Who Dates A Book Nerd Should Know
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Books are for lovers.
If you're lucky enough to date someone who's obsessed with books, know that you're in for a truly unique experience.
Via bookishandnerdy.wordpress.com
Because there's no one else out there quite like a book lover.
Disney / Via professionalfangirls.com
For starters, you'll never run out of book recommendations and will always have someone to go to when you need a new book to read.
Via confessionsofabookaddict.com
But while you're highly encouraged to borrow books, it's absolutely necessary that you return them in a timely manner.
Via confessionsofabookaddict.com
Where In Diagon Alley Should You Work?
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 24, 2015
“There’s only one place we’re going to get all this. Diagon Alley.”
Judd Apatow: Why I Chose Comedy
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 24, 2015
“By my 15th birthday, my obsession was full-blown. I needed to become one of them. The question was, how to do that?”
What follows is a slightly edited version of Judd Apatow's introduction to his new book, Sick in the Head, which is now in stores.
Maritsa Patrinos / BuzzFeed
I was always a fan of comedy and... OK, I have been completely obsessed with comedy for about as long as I can remember. I blame my dad. My dad was not a comedian, but he may have secretly longed to be one. When I was a kid, he would play us Bill Cosby records and even took me to see him perform at Hofstra University for my birthday when I was in fifth grade. (Note: In this essay, I was going to talk at length about Bill Cosby, but I can't, in good conscience, because he has more sexual accusers than I have had partners.) From there I discovered Dickie Goodman, George Carlin, and Lenny Bruce, and then, when Steve Martin hit, I completely lost my mind. I bought every album he put out — and couldn't stop doing an impression of him for the next five years. The biggest fight I ever got into with my parents was when we were at an Italian restaurant for dinner and I was trying to rush them out so we could get home in time to see Steve Martin on The Carol Burnett Show. They refused to hurry through their chicken parmesan and, as a result, I never got to see it. I remain furious.
The mid- to late '70s was a golden age in comedy. You had Richard Pryor, Saturday Night Live, Monty Python, SCTV — all in their prime. The club scene was beginning to explode, too. In my room at night, I would circle the names of all the comedians in the TV Guide who were going to perform on talk shows that week so I wouldn't miss any. When I was in fifth grade, I produced a 30-page report on the life and career of the Marx Brothers and paid my friend Brande Eigen $30 to write it out for me, longhand, because he had better handwriting than I did. This, by the way, was not for school. I wrote it for my own personal use.
A comedy freak was born.
Maritsa Patrinos / BuzzFeed
Do You Have A Drinking Problem?
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, June 24, 2015
After years of living in denial, I finally confronted my alcoholism when I was 35. These are the tough questions I had to ask myself.
Jenny Chang/BuzzFeed
My twentysomething social life was one long drink special. Margaritas with a crust of salt on the rim, a frosty pint spilling foam, and the always regrettable "Who wants shots?"
I had always assumed my drinking would calm down after I graduated college. Instead, it ramped up. The bars opened their pearly gates to me, and I sank into those velvet banquettes and ripped vinyl couches.
I sometimes wondered if I had a problem. I had a tendency to black out — to forget episodes from a night of drinking, even though I remained surprisingly functional (well, "functional" may not be the word for someone pouring beer on her own head) — and every pamphlet, doctor's questionnaire, and glossy magazine quiz I took listed blackouts as a risk factor for alcoholism.
The problem with checklists for alcoholism is that they look a lot like, well, being young. Do you ever drink to get drunk? Have you ever gone to work with a hangover? They might as well ask: Have you ever been 25?
Over the following decade, I kept wondering about my drinking, as my bar bills grew steeper — Patron instead of Jose Cuervo — and my taste more refined. I continued to build the case that my drinking was normal, totally normal. See that guy over there? He's at the bar every night. At least I'm not that bad. I had a good job, I never crashed my car. And yet, I was stuck.
There is a saying among former drunks: "At first drinking is fun, then fun with problems, then just problems." By my mid-thirties, I had found myself in the "problems" portion of the evening.
I quit drinking at the age of 35. How did I know it was time? I arrived at a preponderance of the evidence. Some people do have a lightning flash of recognition, but for me it was more of a slow dawning. I had to sift through data, gather bits of knowledge. I took health surveys online. I talked to my therapist. I read the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous (the bible of AA) and many alcoholism memoirs: Drinking: A Love Story, and Lit, and Smashed, and A Drinking Life, and The Tender Bar, all of which offer compelling and varied tales of people who put the cap back on the bottle for good. Listening to other people's stories may have helped me more than anything else. The more I heard other people's struggles, the more I found words for my own.
The following is a list of aha moments for me. It is not an authoritative list; it's simply one person's experience. I can't stress this enough. What alcoholism looked like for me may not be what it looked like for someone else, and how I define alcoholism may be different from a medical professional (they use the phrase "alcohol use disorder") or another problem drinker. I really can't tell anyone else if they have a drinking problem, or if they're an alcoholic, or if they need to quit. These are complicated questions you must answer on your own. What I can do is show you how I answered these questions for myself.
I spent my early career at alternative newsweeklies, where beer was sometimes kept in the fridge, and anyone walking in with sunglasses and a hangover got a high-five. You see this spirit at many companies with lots of employees in their twenties: Get the work done, and we don't ask questions.
For a long time, I was getting the work done, which is probably why none of my bosses ever confronted me about my drinking. By my thirties, I had developed some red-flag habits. In the evenings, I kept a bottle of wine by my side. I brought my laptop to the bar, and drank pints while I wrote stories. I had an insane workload, and the drinking was partly an attempt to make it tolerable. I told myself I deserved the booze, and the work didn't suffer. But then it did.
One morning, I came into my Manhattan office at 10:30 a.m., having stayed up drinking till 4, and my deeply beloved assistant editor Gchatted me at my desk: "You might want to chew some gum." He could still smell the booze on me, because I was still drunk. Another morning, I called in sick because my hangover was so toxic I couldn't possibly make it without vomiting on myself in a cab or a subway. My friends at work emailed me condolences, and I felt like such a loser.
I stopped being able to write. I had panic attacks when I woke at 5 a.m. If you've ever had a high-pressure position, then you know these can also be part of your job description. But the data points start to converge: Drinking WAS interfering with my ability to work. I was not functioning so well anymore, and it's debatable if I ever really had been.
Like lying about your weight, lying about your drinking is something many people who are not alcoholics do. "How many did you have, honey?" "Oh, two." They do it for benign reasons (they forgot) and slightly sketchy ones (to avoid an argument, to maintain a perfect image). But how often are you lying? And why?
I engaged in the typical "downscaling of the number" when necessary, but I did other things. In New York, I would go out to dinner with friends, share a bottle of wine or two, and then stop by the bodega on my way home to buy a six-pack of beer. I did this because even after a night of drinking, I needed more. I would sometimes find myself dropping casual lies to the guy who worked at the bodega about how I was just hanging out with a friend at home. Why was I lying to the guy at the bodega?
Because I knew what I was doing was wrong.
I lived alone at the time, and could drink as I wished without anyone's commentary, but I could feel the watchful eyes of those bodega guys, who probably saw my wine-stained mouth and my droopy eyes. Mostly I tried to get out of there without any interaction at all.
Other humans can be a valuable metric for our own behavior. Are you afraid of getting caught at something? It might be because what you're doing is wrong.
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