Month: October 2014

✩ Want You To Know: Epic House

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Duffin! Flash crash! The buzzwords that never made it.

Live Shunning

You're in a spot of bother when even your crisis communications consultants drop you and run for the hills.

Watch people 'unlike' Jian Ghomeshi in real time.
Watch people edit Jian Ghomeshi's Wikipedia entry in real time.

Middle East Politics Corner

When Sweden recognised the Palestinian state yesterday, Israel decided to engage in a bit of adult diplomacy. Change just around the corner there, obviously.

Middle Brain Politics Corner

“Remarkably,” writes a team led by P. Read Montague of the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, “brain responses to a single disgusting stimulus were sufficient to make accurate predictions about an individual subject’s political ideology.”

Disgusting

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Stranded abandoned ships

Totally Confused

No robot sex, money and happiness, bear selfies, a Swedish font and camera cleavage compo.

Finally, a study in concentration.

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✩ Want You To Know: Putintin

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In case you missed it yesterday, 45 years ago …

Today in Mallory Ortberg updates, a great interview in Flavorwire.

Gamergate still refuses to just go away and grow up a bit.

Here’s a Downfall parody (why did this take so long to appear?)
Here’s a funny and sweary takedown of crowdfunded misogynist opus magnus The Sarkeesian Effect
Here’s proof, as if it were needed, that the ‘movement’ is really just a large bunch of organised sock puppets on Twitter.

Media Special. Read All About It!

Don’t trust the headlines. Don’t trust the charts. Don’t trust the ads.

If you get past that, your horribly flawed preconceptions are probably skewing your interpretation of the news anyway. Just can’t win.

Oireland

Irish Water belatedly decides data quality and security might be worth taking seriously, looks to recruit a data protection manager. Stable doors come to mind.

Laser is no more. A sad day for film folk.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy: It Burns

Lava.

Totally Confused

Giant ice cubes, God is not a magician, why we gossip, cartoonish vagina butt and how to behave, modernly.

Finally, pet a virtual text-based cat. You’ll feel a whole lot better.

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✩ Want You To Know: “This generation just like has no brain or something.”

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Russian submarine still on the loose in Swedish waters. Sean Connery's whereabouts unknown. They're going to try and 'coax' it to the surface.

A meditation on Microsoft Word and other word processors. FYI, I write this and most other things using Draft, which is extremely wonderful if you're prepared to learn a small bit of markdown.

The most straight-up awful thing contained in this piece on pretty awful site Thought Catalog is the awful portmanteau 'platisher'. It's used five times.

Facebook are trying to make their walled garden a nicer place for teenagers and others to play. Relevant to this, Chambers Dictionary has made 'overshare' its word of the year.

They say you can see censorship but you can't see surveillance. But what about surveillance of your aura?

Oireland

Someone thought that encouraging patronage was a grand idea, and would assuage any fears voters might have about the operations of Irish Water. Give the politicians their own dedicated phone line so they can make 'representations'. A truly Irish solution to an Irish problem.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

The 2014 Wildlife Photographer of the Year award

Clothing Clans of the 21st Century

Totally Confused

Instagram romance, healthier children through time changes, dogs as clever as children, startups still from hell, but Twitter is the source of all evil.

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✩ Want You To Know: Out Of The Corner Of Your Eye You Spot Him

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First, just watch this. "Shia LaBoeuf", live.

The Guardian is now bigger than the New York Times online. Not as big as Mail Online of course.

Public Wi-Fi networks are called public for a reason.

Susan Myers from Florida is this year's Tipper Gore. Does she think there is actual crystal meth in the bag? Anyway, her petition has been successful and Toys 'R' Us have removed the morally corrupting dolls.

If you've ever been to a technology conference, this will be achingly familiar. It's also side-splittingly funny.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy, DIY Edition

DIY geometric masks

Totally Confused

Falsifying rock history, labels that might make people healthier, marriage changes messaging, Back To The Future realities, and this dog doesn't get out of bed for less than $15,000 a month.

Finally, a delightfully sweary take on GamerGate.

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✩ Want You To Know: We are both on the Internet, and we agree about something

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Need some help parsing what people say on the Internet? Mallory Ortberg is here to help. As usual, it is actually worth reading the comments on The Toast.

Of all media outlets, CNN has decided it's time to come out as a voice of reason amidst the Ebola hysteria sweeping the USA. It's done that by running an overwrought story about the hysteria. Sitting alongside this item is a sidebar full of Ebola stories that would impress the creator's of the Mail Online's 'sidebar of shame'.

No, Banksy wasn't arrested, you tabloid ninnies.

Technology / Internets

Microsoft might be better positioned to focus on cloud computing rather than mobile. Well spotted, NYT. Even the average head-in-the-clouds mobile handset consumer might have noticed that Windows phones aren't exactly selling in largew numbers.

Irish people are buying things online. This changes everything.

Monica Lewinsky joins Twitter as part of her campaign to end online bullying. Twitter users start bullying Monica Lewinsky. Don't you go changing, Internet.

Forget this digital communications lark, we should all get back to crafting beautiful handwritten letters.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Trine Sondegaard: Interiors 2007-12

Totally Confused

Zombie-proof cabin, online dating via chimney, cats are horrible, plants are sad when you eat them and mythbusting a MythBuster on McDonalds.

Finally, I made this especially for Irish Water.

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✩ Want You To Know: Turkey Spellcheck

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Quiz: Trent Reznor or household appliance?

The BBC Genome Project has published all the Radio Times listings from 1923 to 2009. The repressed copy editor within you can sign up and help them fix things wot is broke.

Whisper, the totally not insecure app for sharing your innermost thoughts with the Internet turns out to be anything but secure. Could anyone possibly have seen that coming?

Twitter still thinks people would like to see tweets in their timeline from folks they don't follow. Eh, no thanks.

#bastardturkey

A few thoughtful things on GamerGate, because it just won't go away.

The Future Of The Culture Wars Is Here, And It's Gamergate

Gamergate is exactly what it appears to be: a relatively small and very loud group of video game enthusiasts who claim that their goal is to audit ethics in the gaming-industrial complex and who are instead defined by the campaigns of criminal harassment that some of them have carried out against several women.

I've Been Forced Out Of My Home And Am Living In Constant Fear Because Of Relentless Death Threats From Gamergate

They threatened the wrong woman this time. I am the Godzilla of bitches. I have a backbone of pure adamantium, and I’m sick of seeing them abuse my friends.

The Sad Parents of #Gamergate

Imagine! You hear your child talking animatedly about something. He steps closer and you hear him say "bias" and "Sarkeesian." The words drip with spite. Later, you hear him through the bedroom door, talking to his webcam: "No, it's about corruption in games journalism!" What do you do?

Lazy coverage of Gamergate is only feeding this abusive campaign

For any traditional protest movement, a front-page story in America’s leading newspaper linking it with death threats, harassment and terror threats should be a death knell.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Mooooooving

Totally Confused

Homeopathic overdose, the greatest love of all, on Tinder, adultery arms race, autocomplete a song and subway smokebomb redux.

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✩ Want You To Know: Heresy, homoheresy

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Well this is interesting.

"I also joined Twitter to follow Britney Spears" he says. "But I didn't have anything to tweet about. So I figured, hey, tweeting these facts would be a really good idea. It was just so I could feel like I was closer to her.”

People will click on any old made-up crap is the lesson here.

People will also trust any old online service with their naked pics. Well done to everybody involved in this one.

With security in mind, it will be interesting to see how tweeting money works out. Probably not that well.

Weezer have released a whole load of rubbish albums in the last twenty years. Rivers Cuomo still hasn't decided which one is the worst. Hint: It's usually Pinkerton or the one immediately preceding the new one.

Dropbox techdudebros are awful, entitled, 'do you know who we are' types.

'Even so, the Ebola patients I treated were probably just as shocked by my appearance as they were about their intense suffering.'

SCHISM! SCHISM! SCHISM!

What seems to be a mild call for taking the radical option of being somewhat nicer towards gay people has been met with a predictable conservative Catholic response.

The tradition-minded blog Rorate Caeli called the document "heresy, homoheresy."

They're can be so cute when they're angry.

Oireland

It's budget time again. That there chart shows what caused the world's first government budget to be implemented. It looks a lot like the ups and downs of the Irish economy over the last twenty years.

Worth Pondering

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Totally Confused

Wedding stalking, female pickup artistry, real life ninja turtle, animal family portraits and underviewed videos.

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✩ Want You To Know: Jam Tomorrow

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Still in short mode, hopefully there'll be a bit more depth next week. That can in no way be construed as a promise, of course.

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Twin Peaks returns, and the GIFs will be off the charts, or something.

Technology, Surprise! Edition

Surprise! Ads are coming to SnapChat.

Quartz draws the "Venmo Line". It seems people from different age cohorts have different opinions on different things. Surprising.

HTC launches its monster phone. If you've been yearning to leave your phone in shallow water for up to half an hour, this is the phone for you.

The birth of Pong, and by extension the video games industry.

Arcade games, once the domain of pinball companies based in Chicago, would soon be transformed by engineers based in Silicon Valley.

Serious Eye Candy

Wrapped in plastic: Preparing for Ebola

Oireland

Sportspeople: is there nothing they can't launch? This asbestos, it's just everywhere. Mystery jam tomorrow for most from Sinn Fein.

Worth Pondering

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Totally Confused

Camel view, foot arson, fake food, covered in bees and Pope Francis popping pill.

FInally, stay safe out there. Be sure to practice biblically correct sex at all times.

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✩ Want You To Know: We Are All In This Together

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source

Unintentional comedy from an unlikely source today: Facebook may be close to launching an app for anonymous users. In which bizarro parallel universe would anyone trust Facebook to handle their anonymity?

Not all teens, apparently.

From the frivolous but yet deadly serious lawsuits desk, how do you solve a problem like who owns How?

Internets

What happens when you combine the editorial sensibility of Upworthy with the world's most powerful corporations and filter it all through Vice's ad agency?

This. This is what happens. "We are all in this together" is the tagline. It's unclear who the we in this line refers to. Perhaps the megabrands?

Bitcoin. Still a bit wobbly.

Ello is over, now you need to be on Owdy. It has a manifesto!

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Watch Anita Sarkeesian at XOXO talk about the tactics the whiny, angry man-babies of GamerGate use to discredit her and other women online. Heed her advice and never post anything on 4Chan, ever.

Meanwhile, the New York Times helpfully runs a piece on how women have frequently been written out of the history of technology in the Fashion & Style section.

Twitter is suing the US Government to allow it tell the world how much snooping the US Government is doing.

Serious Eye Candy

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Molly Crabapple illustrates daily life in Raqqa under Islamic State control.

Worth Pondering

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Totally Confused

RocketSkates, artisanal pregnancy, daycare heroin, secure parking and copycat clowns.

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✩ Want You To Know: “worried, sometimes in tears”

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image via

Hello Commander Hadfield, for the past year and a half my 5-year-old son goes to bed worried, sometimes in tears. He is worried about the Voyager Interstellar spacecraft, the fact that it is out there all by itself. He wants it to come home to be safe. What do we tell him?

Chris Hadfield provides yet more evidence that he may be the nicest person on this planet.

Obligatory link to 'Space Oddity' cover

In Hong Kong, polite is dangerous.

Internets

From the Department of Didn't See That Coming, Adaptive Path has been acquired by a bank

Those security breaches just keep on coming. JP Morgan Chase, the largest bank in the USA, has so far admitted that it hasn't found any evidence of "fraud involving the use of customer information". Which means either A) they're just making this up or B) they're even more incompetent than they'd like anyone to know. Time will tell and it's unlikely to be pleasant for end users. Doubt it will bother the bank too much overall though.

There will soon be a dedicated social network for every niche interest. In this case, stoners.

Facebook has rowed back on its real names policy, sort of. If Facebook actually thinks this policy will help reduce misogyny, racism and every other type of abuse then they're a teensy-weensy bit deluded. They obviously haven't looked at what their users are actually doing and saying on their platform, or off their platform using their Facebook IDs for that matter.