This frivolous weather thing the hippies keep harping about just devastated the biggest, most densely populated, city in the country. The city that never sleeps shut down completely. The structural damage and loss in revenue are unprecedented. Even before Sandy, our weather-related fatalities far exceed the Americans who've died from terrorist attacks. Since September 11, 2001 there have been roughly 30 Americans killed by terrorism (depending on how you do the numbers). Meanwhile, extreme weather deaths in the same time period have totaled 6,408 as of 2011, according to the National Weather Service.

Thankfully, New York's most precious resident, Mitik, survived Hurricane Sandy unscathed. But now the real trouble begins.

Since Sandy flushed New York City's subway system like a filthy urinal in the Times Square T.G.I. Fridays there has been much anxiety over the fate of our city's prodigious subway rats. Would New York streets now be overrun by disease-ridden rats driven from their subterranean lairs? No, says a guy whose singular passion is hunting and killing New York City rats.

No more gorging yourselves on free information like vulgar little savages: The New York Times has announced it will be reinstating its paywall later today.

Trend alert! The trend is: waiting in line. This is what we do now in New York City. Want to get to Manhattan from Brooklyn? Wait in line! Want to get gas? Wait in line! Want to buy an iPad Mini? Well, fuck off, first of all, but then, wait in line. We've crowd-sourced information on most of the area's major lines, and present them here to you in a handy guide format. We'll update as the day goes on; if you have information email us at tips@gawker.com.

New York City is currently experiencing a crippling gas shortage. The entire New York City/New Jersey region has twelve gallons of gas, post-Sandy. (Estimation.) Hours-long lines at the pumps have exploded in brawls and even gun-waving. How bad is it, really? We want to hear your worst horror stories of waiting at the pump, siphoning gas from parked cars, or bartering your cat for fuel. Please email them to: Tips@gawker.com

If you are waiting in line outside of a motherfucking Apple store in Manhattan to buy an iPad Mini right now, it's time to reevaluate your priorities in life.

NASA's Earth Observatory has published some great before-and-after images of the tri-state area - the top taken at 2:14 a.m. on August 31; the bottom at 2:52 a.m. yesterday, November 1. From Earth Observatory:

Some skateboarders in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens used the downed trees and destruction in their neighborhood to their advantage and built a skate ramp.

Snooki and her trusty gang are lending their spray tanned hands to help out New Jersey in the aftermath of this week's storm. Snooki tweeted this morning, "Cleaning my closet today to donate clothes and whatever I can do the victims affected by sandy! I'm comin with clothes!!!!"

Last night I left my warm, powered apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and biked over the Brooklyn Bridge into lower Manhattan with two friends. It was the most perverse kind of adjusted New Yorker tourism: leave behind your quaint Brooklyn neighborhood, with unlimited burrata and cold craft beers, to see the blacked-out skyscrapers of Wall Street in the dark. But we were getting antsy-my muscles may be atrophying by now, I think-and we wanted to see it for ourselves.

Last night at Williamsburg’s most popular gay bar, the Metropolitan, it barely felt like Halloween. It was packed with guys who weren’t in costume. Those who were dressed up mostly came as women - some woman, any woman - which they probably don’t need Halloween as an excuse to do. The music was normal, barely spooky. Siouxsie & the Banshees’ “Peek a Boo” bled into a key-clashing mash-up of Madonna’s “Holiday” and Kelis’ “Milkshake.” I did hear “Thriller,” the sound of the season, as I headed outside into weather that was a little too warm, but perfectly crisp for Oct. 31.

Welcome to a special Hurricane Sandy edition of Thatz Not Okay, a regular column in which I school inquiring readers on what is and is not okay. Please send your questions to caity.weaver@gawker.com with the subject "Thatz Not Okay."

Manhattan is a city divided by power: uptown thrives and strengthens on electricity and wifi and artisanal cheese, while downtown grows meaner and leaner with each passing day in the dark. There are 1.6 million coexisting on 23 square miles with a clear, dangerous divide between them, and power likely won't return until the weekend. The center cannot hold. Chaos is imminent. And so we ask: Who will win the inevitable Uptown-Down Civil War of 2012?

Madison Square Garden is a name so synonymous with New York City greatness and success that artists and athletes who perform there have a tendency to call it "the main stage of the world" and "a mecca." So how does Madison Square Garden treat its New York City employees, who have helped sustain its grandness, when they're down and out? By demanding they get back to work, of course.

Every black-clad, chain-smoking SoHo gallery owner and martini-lunching, town car-riding hedge fund manager started out life as a chubbly, freckle-faced kid from South Dakota.

No one mourns a troll. This is the thing about Shashank Tripathi, the anonymous Twitter user outed by Buzzfeed's Jack Stuef on Tuesday morning after a night creating and spreading false rumors on Twitter. I tend to agree with Heidi Moore: the responsibility for the dissemination of those rumors lies with the journalists who retweeted or reported them, not with Tripathi, who has no personal or professional obligation to tell the truth on Twitter, no matter how influential his followers are. A lot of journalists and outlets reported false things on Monday, including CNN and Reuters* and Andrew Kaczynski, the Buzzfeed writer who initially called Tripathi out. Tripathi never claimed to be a journalist or a credible source; in fact, he was always clear that he was the opposite: a troll.

I'm eating oatmeal. Are you? If your power is not on, I doubt it buddy, unless you have built a fire, which sounds nice. What can you eat during these primitive powerless days until life returns to normal?

After Gov Cuomo declared a transportation emergency, the MTA is waiving all fares this Thursday & Friday. [twitter.com]

Alas, post-Sandy New York is not all feel-good tales of entrepreneurial ingenuity and upscale Halal carts; there's also been some looting. Police arrested 15 people in the Far Rockaway section of Queens and nine others in Coney Island, including one woman who was charged with possession of a firearm after police found a gun in the safe she was in the process of stealing.