The Hard Times is a satire site in the vein of The Onion, but with content focused more on hipsters, punk rock, and video game culture. And it is a national fucking treasure that I will defend until my dying day (because I feel personally attacked by every article, and it's great).

Case in point: on June 7th, the Hard Times ran a piece with the headline, "Village People Kick Out Police Officer." Which is funny. Because the country is in the midst of a massive(ly long overdue) revolt against police officers. And also the Village People.

But apparently the Village People did not find it so amusing. Their PR rep reached out to Hard Times founder Matt Saincome, threatening legal action for what, in their interpretation, was clearly a defamatory smear piece and not, ya know, satire. "No one can kick the cop out (sic) Village People because he's an owner of Village People," wrote the PR rep. That'll learn 'em!

Saincome responded in the only reasonable way: "Prepare for the most scorched earth encounter you have ever had, motherfucker. You will rue the day you began this lifelong blood feud."

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— Matt Saincome (@MattSaincome) June 9, 2020

Somehow, Howard Stern's co-host Robin Quiver got wind of this, and tried to get Howard Stern all riled up about it. Another staffer did eventually chime in to mention that it was probably from a satire site, although Robin Quiver continued to insist that it was just, "hanging out with the rest of the news." Read the rest

Nearly a year after the New York Times reported that five women had accused Louis C.K. of sexual misconduct, his longtime friend Sarah Silverman told Howard Stern Monday that C.K. used to masturbate in front of her. The difference? She gave him full consent to do so.

Indiewire:

“I know I’m going to regret saying this,” Silverman said. “I’ve known Louis forever, I’m not making excuses for him, so please don’t take this that way. We are peers. We are equals. When we were kids, and he asked if he could masturbate in front of me, sometimes I’d go, ‘Fuck yeah I want to see that!’… It’s not analogous to the other women that are talking about what he did to them. He could offer me nothing. We were only just friends. Sometimes, yeah, I wanted to see it, it was amazing. Sometimes I would say, ‘Fucking no, gross,’ and we got pizza.”

Silverman said these encounters happened when the two comedians were younger and “letting our freak flags fly.” The comedian shared another story in which the two would strip naked in C.K.’s apartment building and throw their clothes out the window onto the street and proceed to go down the elevator naked to retrieve them. Silverman was clear these were consensual moments between the two and were not comparable to the experiences of the women who accused C.K. of sexual harassment.

The overall point Silverman was making hinged on how C.K. initially failed to realize the inappropriate predicament he was putting younger comics in by asking to masturbate in front of him once he became well-known and more powerful within the comedy world.

There used to be 25 years of Howard Stern interviews with now-president Donald Trump to listen to. But not anymore: the unofficial archive's been taken offline after a DMCA takedown notice came by FedEx.

On Wednesday afternoon, roughly 48 hours after it was put up, the audio trove has been removed from YouTube and SoundCloud. For now, the transcripts remain on Factba.se, a website created by the startup FactSquared.

 

Factba.se published a total of around 15 hours' worth of audio—exclusively of the minutes when Trump was on The Howard Stern Show—gathered from nearly 25 years of shows, starting in 1993 and ending in 2015.

"We were in the process of putting [the audio files] on our own server, but then FedEx showed up and that was the official stop," Bill Frischling, the CEO of FactSquared, told Ars. "So we had a good conversation with our attorneys today, and we’re going to be reaching out to [SiriusXM’s attorneys] pretty darned soon. We’ve already exchanged brief notes, everybody is hoping to get it resolved amicably. Our goal is to preserve the record. At least right now, this is the only public version of a massive, quarter-century trove of interviews."