Welcome to day one of With Leather’s “Make People Say Stuff” Initiative, where we stop openly begging you to comment on posts throughout the day and try to lure you into an Inception’d sense of commenting urgency with a new social set-up, complete with incentives and, once we figure out what to give you, WONDERFUL PRIZES. Couple that with our free fantasy football game (click the busty cheerleaders above or below this post) and we’re basically the ATM of websites. Consider “being interested in things” as your $5 usage charge.

The current features of the new commenting system are:

- Signup using Facebook or Twitter
- Universal login on any Uproxx site
- User Profiles — comments made on any Uproxx site are
aggregated on your profile
- Profile Avatars — use your Facebook, Twitter or a custom avatar
- Clickable avatars — shows mini profile with recent comments

And, if that wasn’t enough, Coming Soon:

- Direct messaging
- Threaded replies to comments
- Commenting awards and badges

So it’s pretty cool. Hop down into the comments here and let us know what you think, because hey, the way we give out rewards is random at this point and I might decide to give you a gift. Just kidding, I’m giving it to Upstate Underdog.

Links

Brandon McCarthy Of The Athletics Knows What The Dugout Is - In one of the most important moments of my creative life, a guy who plays baseball likes my baseball comic. Unbelievable. Turns out all I had to do was hate a player everyone hates already! [@BMcCarthy32]

New ‘Justified’ Villains Cast! - Anne Hathaway in a leather suit! Tom Hardy with a jockstrap on his face! [Warming Glow]

Reddit’s Jailbait Message Board Shut Down For Good, It Seems - This calls for a wistful Bob Dylan-scored retrospective. First the Camwhores chan threads where you could find naked pictures of Mitra, and now this. RIP [UPROXX]

First Avengers Trailer Is Finally Here - This, combined with the joke I made in this week’s Best and Worst of Raw, is going to make me go to BuyBacks and buy A Love Song For Bobby Long, or as I like to call it, Scarlett Johansson Smoking: The Movie. [Gamma Squad]

23 Famous People You Didn’t Know Were Mormon - Hold on, Julie from ‘The Real World’ is a Mormon? No way. [Buzzfeed]

TV Chef Claims Eating Puppy Meat Is No Worse Than Pork - I’m sure this’ll get met with a dismissive wank by the “lol bacon” crowd, but there you go. Also, I don’t know if you noticed it, but eating shrimp is like eating wet cockroaches. [FARK]

Paula Deen Flirts With Matt Lauer - Not as good as the “Giada de Laurentiis Flirts With Brandon Stroud” story I wrote in my sleep last night. [AOL TV]

Restaurant Customer Leaves Negative $2 Tip and Tells the Waitress to Lose Weight - Or as it was originally titled, “facetious dickhead now hilarious to facetious dickheads on Internet”. [The Daily What]

Fun with Penis Confusion: Comparing Alison Brie’s Cleavage to Joel McHale’s Buttcrack - With a close enough proximity to Alison Brie, I really wouldn’t care if that was Joel McHale’s buttcrack. [Pajiba]

Most Likely the Nerdiest Tattoo on the Planet - The guy with the Hulk Hogan Flexing backpiece gently weeps. [Unreality]

Pic unrelated. But hey!

Our (hopefully) monthly, one-night fantasy baseball game through DraftStreet.com picks up tomorrow for all Friday games, so if you’re in and haven’t chosen your team, please do so now.

If you haven’t gotten that far yet, now’s the time to sign up. You choose a team of players for one night of Major League Baseball, and the team that performs the best (namely “the 70 or so people finishing ahead of With Leather’s editor”) cash money. Not Internet money, not Facebook likes, U.S. currency (or Francs, or rupies, I don’t know) you can use to spend on anything from additional games at DraftStreet to your rent to ill-fitting orange bathing suits. We’ve paying out the top six teams from a $300 cash pool this time, and ask the people in the comments: real readers have won money. We aren’t asking you to sign up for our newsletter in exchange for squat.

Sign up through this link if you’ve been too gun shy to click anything so far and join our league. The game happens tomorrow, remember, so get cracking. Pick Buster Posey! I heard he’s good!

I mean, she’s telling you to try everything, so once you’ve played fantasy baseball with us through DraftStreet.com that’s one more thing off your list, and you can get around to misting voluptuous teenagers with spray bottles. And then you’re right there.

We’ve started doing these monthly, and if you haven’t participated before, now’s the time to sign up. You choose a team of players for one night of Major League Baseball, and the team that performs the best (namely “everyone but Brandon”) cash money. Not Internet money, not plus-ones, U.S. currency (or currency from where you live, I don’t know) you can use to spend on anything from additional games at DraftStreet to your rent to delicious SOBE© brand beverages. We’ve paying out the top six teams from a $300 cash pool this time, so there is seriously no reason to keep being that guy who doesn’t play.

Sign up through this link (have you found the link yet) and join our league. The game starts on Friday, so don’t wait. We’re going to get the whole Uproxx crew playing again, and since we’re all blinded by the brilliant whiteness of our redesign you’ll have an even better chance of beating us than last month.

It sorta looks like somebody broke in and stole our furniture, but at least we don’t have an “under construction” gif at the top of the page anywhere. Copy pasta’d liberally from Mr. Matt Ufford:

As with most layout changes, there are some things to like and some things not to like, but for the most part the changes are intended to improve the user experience. In the end, this is still gonna be the same website, but if you’re super-pissed off about it, please send constructive hate mail to info@uproxx.com.

We are under construction, though, so bless this mess.

Sports

NFL Teams Be Transactin’ - Hey look! The NFL got its act together and now everybody’s doing things. Let’s keep up this momentum and do things for the rest of the season. That would be awesome! [Kissing Suzy Kolber]

Talking Trades: 5 Deadline Deals That Should Go Down - It’s not the coolest thing to admit, but I’m gonna go ahead and come out as the guy who would be super excited if David Wright ended up in Cleveland. Also, BJ Upton. And Beltran. Let’s go Tribe! [Smoking Section]

The Citi Field Stormer: A Celebration of Bad Planning - He still planned better than the dude in the wedding dress, because he planned to not be a dude in a wedding dress. [SBN]

Voelker TKOs Bowling - This title is pretty misleading. I thought this was going to be a new episode of Jenn Sterger’s show. [Cagewriter]

With Leather

The Dugout: Crooked Neck Club - I should just link to everything, because it all looks so fresh and new. Don’t miss yesterday’s Dugout, which is about surface piercings, doodoo and “Laverne & Shirley”. I’m old. And weird. [The Dugout]

Unbreak My Heart: A Retrospective of Jay Cutler and Kristin Cavallari - You know you’re a terrible quarterback when your reality show girlfriend seems too good for you. [With Leather]

Christianity Is Brought To You With Limited Commercial Interruption, By Ford™ - The worst pre-race prayer ever, dressed up as the “best prayer ever” and championed as cool by Christians because “God should be awesome”. No he shouldn’t, Spuds McKenzie should be awesome. God should be completely different. [With Leather]

We Hate This Soccer Guy Because He’s Black! - I mean, WE don’t, but soccer fans sure do. Also, big ups to the commenter who said they clicked this article thinking it was going to be about Nintendo, because that was the entire headline joke. [With Leather]

Not Sports

Katy Perry’s Smurftastic Smurf Premierer Mini-Dress - Witness the beginning of the end for Katy Perry, as she stops looking like the busty Zooey Deschanel and starts looking like a busty Hilary Burton. Perez Hilton should’ve worn the same thing, but with Snagglepuss on the front. [FARK]

Comic-Con Photo Diary Part 2 - I feel like a Comic-Con diary could be accomplished in one paragraph. “Saw some kinda hot girls dressed like things, awkwardly walked past a comic book artist/writer/creator I didn’t recognize or want to talk to, gave Xander 40 bucks to take a picture with me.” Is there more to it than that? [Film Drunk]

Awesome and Ridiculous San Diego Comic-Con Cosplay - None of these people are as awesome or ridiculous as my last two Halloween costumes, Hooded Justice and The Peculiar Purple Pie-Man of Porcupine Peak. I want to be Longshot this year, but do you know how hard it is to find a vegan leather bodysuit? [Gamma Squad]

Meme Watch: LOLSummer69 Thinks Tumblr Has Always Wanted to See Them Naked - Real talk: I want to see everybody naked. [UPROXX]

Starting at 11PM EST tonight, Uproxx is rolling out its new site designs, and here’s an exclusive sneak peek of ours. Like it? I think the bright colors really make it pop, and I will keep identifying links as “virus” or “not a virus” for your convenience.

But no, seriously, the new designs switch over tonight and I think you’ll like it a lot. It looks a lot like the Uproxx main page now, so you’ll be able to +1 things and navigate more smoothly. You’ll still have to scroll through 1-400 pro wrestling posts weekly, but that’s more of an in-house issue. The new login for comments is going to be under the search bar and I’ve been asked to point that out to you, but I don’t have anywhere to point just yet, so be aware.

A few notes:

- Though most changes will be minor, we will no longer be featuring panda sex.
- Sign-up and push for the DraftStreet free fantasy baseball game for July starts tomorrow, so if you’re the type who’d like to be able to log-in effectively without issue, go ahead and sign up for that now.
- Best and Worst of Raw will have slightly bigger pictures, because we’ll have more space in the column.
- I love you, and I think you’ll like it.

So! We’ll talk more about this tomorrow, so when the midi archive and blood bars go up, let us know what you think.

Your loving editor,
Brandon