I had no idea things were so dire in Australia, but — actually, you know what? Prison Island is EXACTLY the kind of place where you’d expect millionaires to take nocturnal dumps in front of local restaurants. Still, thanks to the folks at NMA for bringing this to our attention.

Beer commercials decoded: “Beer is cheap and easy to find. The only cost should be $6.99 for a six pack, at any convenience store. And rather than hiding from women to drink their beer, many single adult heterosexual men seek out female company when they’re drinking. ‘Drink our beer and avoid contact with women!’ — who could possibly be the target for that pitch? But it makes perfect sense if the target audience is — and it is — 16-year-olds. The girls aren’t really girls; they’re Mom. And Mom is the first hurdle in the thrilling obstacle course that makes up the world of the teenage beer drinker.”

Five Questions & Answers from the Ashley Madison ‘Affair Guarantee’ FAQs

by Abe Sauer

Q. Why am I required to post a primary photo in my public or private showcase?
A. We have found that members with photos have a better experience on AshleyMadison.com. In fact, users with photos are 10 times more likely to be contacted! It is for this reason that the program rules specify that you must have at least one primary photo.

Q. How do I ask for my guarantee?
A. If, after 3 months of purchasing your Affair Guarantee Membership Package you are eligible for the $249 refund please click on the following “Affair Guarantee Refund Application”. Requests must be made within 30 days of Program expiration.

Q. What happens to my Membership Package if I did not qualify for the refund?
A. Your outstanding credits can be used at any time and are not limited to the first 3 months of your membership. Please continue to use the service at your leisure and we trust you will find that someone special.

Q. I sent or responded to 18 people each month, why didn’t it count?
A. The program rules state that you must send or reply to a minimum of 18 unique AshleyMadison.com members each month (“unique” meaning users you have not previously contacted). In addition, your initial mail message must be sent “Priority” for which you will receive a confirmation that the member has opened your message. Sending mail with priority status is proven to draw more attention than sending mail with regular mail status.

Q. How do I purchase the Affair Guarantee program?
A. It’s easy! Simply purchase the Affair Guarantee Membership Package. To learn more about the program, please read our program rules. If you have not encountered someone special after 3 months and followed all the program rules, you will qualify for the $249 refund + applicable taxes.

Abe Sauer remembers a simpler time, when having affairs was easy.

An animal sanctuary in Canada is taunting polar bears by placing delicious, fun-size appetizers just out of their reach. Terrible.

The Awl: Mark Armstrong, you had a perfectly nice job as the Director of Content at Bundle, and presumably before that you had other real jobs, and then you went and quit your job to really focus on developing Longreads, which, duh, draws attention to longform writing. Why did you do that?

Mark Armstrong: So, here’s the thing: I’ve worked in the Internet coal mine for more than ten years now. I moved from Los Angeles to New York in 2001, and in that time I worked for both giant companies and tiny startups. During this time I noticed that the stuff that works best is a.) driven by people who are truly obsessed with what they’re building b.) useful to people as a service, and c.) resonates with an audience fairly quickly. With Longreads, I realized I was obsessed with the idea, and other people understood, liked it and found it useful, so for me I really had no choice. I had to pursue it or I’d kick myself in two years for letting it pass. Didn’t happen overnight, though: I spent a year and a half doing it as a small side project on Twitter, and that helped me determine what this thing was supposed to be.

The Awl: I have also always been told by VC and angel types that entrepreneurs have to be obsessed with their project, and that’s an indicator of future success. So your obsession is good! So, since you pioneered at Bundle the personal finance interview, I feel free to ask you this: how did you take your side business and make it into a real business? Did you sock away a little cash? Did you sell your sneaker collection?

Mark Armstrong: My sneaker collection is pretty horrendous. That didn’t get me far. But yes, that’s also part of the whole “preparation” thing, which was making sure you can afford to go a little while on the lean side as you build it out. I felt good about my window, but that’s the most important piece. And speaking of Bundle, I’ll refer readers to Logan Sachon’s interview with journalist Matt Davis, in which he talks about saving money as the critical element to having personal and professional freedom. Unless you have that financial cushion, you are not going to have the freedom to build your own thing. By the way, it’s also not an all or nothing thing. I still do quite a bit of consulting and freelance.

The Awl: Oh well, that’s very fancy of you. And I have heard of this thing called “saving.” It’s a fascinating concept. It seems like it has some value, maybe it will catch on. So what you have now is what they call a “multiplatform” vehicle: you have a well-followed Twitter account, a devoted hashtag, a Tumblr interface, a weekly email and a very nicely done website, with a searchable database. And you encourage people to use accompanying products in the market — Instapaper, Flipboard, etc. So do you have a sense of how you make this thing that people love — or really, this community, because Longreads is actually a community — and make it into a business?

Mark Armstrong: Well, the big goal from this entire thing was to rethink the media property as a service, rather than just one site. We existed on Twitter long before we launched Longreads.com, so that actually helped us clarify how we wanted the entire product to work. Longreads.com was created to do the things that Twitter couldn’t handle as well — archiving the thousands of long-form stories we’ve posted over the past two years, adding context with elements like word counts and reading times, quotes from the stories, and author and publisher pages for readers to browse their favorites. Without giving too much away, we think there’s value in this approach, and there are certainly ways to monetize through methods that don’t disrupt or degrade our (and the entire community’s) service to readers. They want the best stories from everywhere, they want it on their own terms, they want to take it with them on their phone through apps like Instapaper and Read It Later, and they want it from a source they can trust.

The Awl: In conclusion: how many nights a month do you wake up in a cold sweat thinking you’ve made the wrong choice?

Mark Armstrong: Never. Usually I’m just awake at 3 a.m. reading 25,000-word Scientology stories from The New Yorker.

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Sure, you could read the New York Times’s guide to shoveling snow, but perhaps you might find our comprehensive manual on the subject more entertaining. It is certainly a lot more sweary, which has got to count for something.

2 Girls 1 Cup took the web by storm — back in summer of 2007. Goatse — the infamous picture that first gaped at us in 1999! — has been popular and not popular in waves over the years since, but the last few years? Not so much. Whatever happened to Tubgirl and Eel Girl? (If you have never seen these things, worry not!) There was also, a few years back, some website that was supposed to be the future of the Internet, devoted to tabloid play of death and destruction video. Now I can’t even remember what it’s called and can’t even Google it up.

The infamous grossout site Ogrish resolves now to the far tamer Live Leak, where today’s top story seems to be “Holy Shit! Snow comes off semi trailer traveling down highway.” Not exactly lady-on-lady coprophilia! Live Leak, to its credit, seems to get tens of million of pageviews a month? (But that looks to be down from a peak of more than double that, two years ago.) The gross-obsessed Rotten.com, as well, is sorta still grossly pottering along. But the Stile Project (oh man, now that is a website I have not thought about in literally eleven years, since it won a Webby Award in the “Weird” category in 2000) has long since become a truly inelegant little site largely composed of straightforwardly gross man-oriented hetero porn.

What happened? The Internet was great at being a foul cesspool of shock, but it looks like that’s over now.

B3ta is chugging along nicely, but it’s stock-in-trade was never straight-up foulness, more like actual fun. 4chan is 4chan, who can tell what’s going on over there, but they’re not beaming foulness out in the general direction of the Internet.

It stands to reason that the expansion of tools and ever-greater access to the Internet and ever-greater storage should, at the very least, just create more Internet, in all its forms. And certainly amateur porn is doing just fine, though the lines between amateur and professional porn are constantly being blurred. (“Amateur” porn is a fine business!)

But with the ability to access every possible person in the world who’s into, say, hardcore Nazi-inflected furry torture, and with everyone so willing to amuse and be amused, why aren’t we seeing more gross-out bubble to the surface? The obvious answer seems sort of sad: there’s no business in it.

The enjoyable and more mainstream websites that propagate meme-related stuff on the web, like Urlesque (currently most-popular: Cab Driver Does Spot-on Michael Jackson Impression) and Buzzfeed (most popular: Top 10 Crazy Texts From Parents), are actually grown-up entities and can’t and won’t handle actual shock material, as seems quite correct. (One is owned by AOL; the other is the team behind the Huffington Post.) And so there’s really no one left to identify the next famous Brazilian lesbian scat porn trailer and force it upon its non-intended audience.

I certainly didn’t actually need or even want to see another death video or extreme butt-related gross-out video. But it seems shocking that you’re not forcing it upon me by surprise. The professionalized web has its delights but it definitely lacks the element of surprise.

In shocking and unprecedented news about all the crap we put into our bodies, it turns out that fried, fatty foods might not be good for you, even right from the beginning: “Toddlers fed a diet of junk food can suffer lasting damage to their brainpower, researchers warn. Children who eat more chips, crisps, biscuits and pizza before the age of three have a lower IQ five years later, a study showed. The difference could be as much as five IQ points compared with children given healthier diets with fruit, vegetables and home-cooked food.”

Surprisingly, I have met many people who do not know the difference between a cast iron skillet and any other normal frying pan. Are you one of them? It pains me to say this, but it must be said: That’s ignorant on your part. It’s like not knowing the difference between Michael Jordan and every other basketball player ever, which is just exceptionally ignorant. In both the case of the cast iron skillet vs. the regular frying pan and Michael Jordan vs. every other basketball player ever, you’re unaware that both cast iron skillets and Michael Jordan are the best of all time in their respective fields.

So, I get it, you don’t understand what’s so great about a cast iron skillet (if you don’t get what’s so good about Michael Jordan, this is a link to his Wikipedia entry). Here’s a quick primer.

1. It gets really hot and retains a lot of heat. Often when cooking meats, specifically steak, it’s important that the first surface that your meat touches (TWSS) be insanely hot. Why? Because that way it creates a crust that seals in all of the juices and keeps your meat moist and delicious (TWSS!)! The cast iron skillet is critical to cooking a delicious steak, this is very important to remember. I’m sure if you are cooking vegetables (eye roll), it’s just as good as for that.

2. Even distribution of heat. Along with heat retention, an even distribution of heat is also really important to the cooking process, ESPECIALLY if you’re searing (as mentioned above), deep frying, or even baking. So make sure you’re always preheating your cast iron skillet, and also not burning yourself, because you want a nice even (often high) heat to get your best results.

3. It’s versatile. So we know you can cook a steak with a cast iron skillet, great. You know what else you can do? Bake an mf-ing pie! A PIE. Can you believe that? Isn’t it insane that you can just throw this skillet in the oven right after you’ve been using it on the stove? If this doesn’t impress you, then kudos on having a life so filled with wonder that the versatility of cooking utensils leaves you joyless and dead inside. Me, I’m not like that. I’m not like you. I enjoy life.

Obviously, life isn’t perfect. We’re all fallible. And like us, and unlike Michael Jordan, the cast iron skillet has some flaws. It’s a little heavy (IT’S MADE OF CAST IRON, NOT FEATHERS). If you have difficulties with spatial relations, it’s possible that you will burn yourself. But you know what? Maybe you deserve it. If you can’t stand the heat of a cast iron skillet, then get out of the kitchen and stop trying to grab the handles of cast iron skillets that have been preheated without wearing some sort of protective hand thingie. But for those of you who are able to navigate your way around a stove, get yourself a cast iron skillet. I cannot overemphasize the richness it will bring to your life.

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Bird stabs man: “Cockfighting can be a fatal activity, not just for the roosters. A 35-year-old Lamont man died Sunday after being stabbed in the leg by a sharp blade that was attached to a fighting bird, authorities said.”