The ‘Gamer Girls’ Making Bank Playing ‘Fortnite’ with Gamer Boys, The Gold Prospectors of YouTube and Sonic’s Jacked Up Teeth

Jeez, when YouTube isn’t fostering hate or selling impressionable kids loot-box scams, I’m reminded that there’s still some really cool shit to watch on the video-sharing site. Bearded loners fishing nuggets of gold out of riverbeds? Sign me up.

Though, in reading Eddie Kim’s profile of the unassuming stars of YouTube’s gold-prospecting genre, I must admit I was disappointed there wasn’t any attention given to perhaps this country’s most famous old prospector, Gus Chiggins:

Cinnamon and gravy, hunting for gold sure does sound like fun.

Must Read

“For ‘Gamer Girls’ Paid to Play ‘Fortnite,’ Therapy Skills Are Almost Required”
For tutors, voice actors and others taking odd jobs in the gig economy, Fiverr has become among the biggest sites for freelancers looking for quick work. For female gamers, however, work on Fiverr is a bit more unconventional: Charging young men $40 an hour or more to play co-op on popular games like Fortnite and Overwatch. And if their clients make it through a stringent on-boarding process, these “gamer girls” are worth every penny they charge. Because not only do they make kick-ass squadmates, but they’re easy to talk to as well. READ MORE

There’s Still Gold in Dem Der Hills

When Dan Hurd isn’t working as a teacher and a counselor, he’s panning for gold as a modern-day prospector working in the hills of Western Canada. Solitary work, typically, but Hurd has plenty of company — 55,000-plus followers on his YouTube channel, one of biggest in the rapidly growing gold-panning genre — all eager to see what he’ll pull out of the river next.

Coworker From Hell

Most people have worked, at least once, with someone whose attitude, personality or collaborative style rubbed them the wrong way. And no doubt, working with someone you don’t like can be the difference between a job you love and a job you hate. But while we might not be able to escape their boring, pointless emails or their stupid, evil faces, at least we can lessen the impact our work nemeses have on our daily lives.

Blow Us Up, Please

This week, NASA scientists and other space experts from around the globe are practicing defending Earth from a fictitious asteroid that has a 1 percent chance of impact. Meanwhile everyone else is like, “nah, let it hit us.”

After all, being vaporized in a split second sure beats years of climate change, crippling debt and fighting in the water wars!

Don’t Open, Dead Inside

Increasingly, Facebook is a digital cemetery where friends and loved ones can still interact with what’s left of our digital remains. And a new study suggests that if Facebook doesn’t recruit new members, by 2070, the deceased will outnumber the living. It will be a social network for hundreds of millions of dead people.

Whole Lotta Porn

Porn: It’s a guy thing. Right? Okay, maybe not, but at least us guys can stake claim to watching more of it than our wives and girlfriends, right? No? Hmm, that’s worrisome. Let’s all freak out about it.

Bedroom Feng Shui

On the road to becoming an adult, there are a few milestones: The first time you shave, the first time you have a (legal) drink, and of course, the first time you move your bed out of the corner and into the center of your room. To this end, the move from corner to the center as a mark of adulthood is a perfectly straightforward one: A corner bed implies you sleep alone; a middle-of-wall bed implies, hey, this guy fucks.

But is the center of the wall actually the best place for your bed? Not necessarily — in fact, depending upon the layout, your bedroom feng shui could be entirely jacked up.

What A Stud

One of the most memorable scenes in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction comes toward the beginning of the film when a heavily-pierced Rosanna Arquette matter-of-factly explains to John Travolta that the stud in her tongue “helps fellatio”:

Like the rumor that Marilyn Manson had his last rib removed so he could suck his own dick, no one entirely knows how the tongue-stud-dick-sucking theory got started; in fact, the sexualization of tongue piercings probably has to do with the fact that many people fetishize almost anything involving mouths. Societal assumptions aside, though, the evidence does suggest that tongue piercings have the capacity to improve oral sex.

The New Sonic’s Got Some Serious Chompers

A great deal of digital ink has been spilled bemoaning Sonic the Hedgehog’s new “look” since the first poster for Sonic the Hedgehog leaked at the end of last year. Unfortunately, those fears were confirmed this week when the first trailer for the movie was released.

But for most fans, the fact that Sonic looks more like the kid from Jumanji than the original Sega character is the least of their worries. The real horror show is his set of terrifyingly human teeth:

Quinn Myers spoke to numerous dentists and a representative at the ADA to find out what the actual fuck is going on here.

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Jeff Gross

Jeff Gross is MEL’s senior editor for social media and content marketing. His daily ICYMI column, which chronicles all things meta on the site, is the quickest way to catch up on MEL, and the funniest thing you’ll read all day. Follow him on Twitter.