It's time to say goodbye to one of Dublin's primary litter generating mechanisms. The Metro Herald will cease publication on Friday. Not the saviour of print journalism after all.

Various Internets

Keeping busy this Christmas season, Julian Assange is working on funding a lifesize statue of himself. A key pillar of Uber's expansion strategy is to crowdsource a mob of users as unpaid lobbyists, as well as using oodles of old-fashioned paid-for lobbyists of course. Mail Kimp remixed – this will make absolutely no sense if you haven't listened to at least one episode of Serial. Slate has a stab at listing the 25 best podcast episodes ever.

Design Corner

Responsive design explained in GIFs. A hexadecimal colour clock in your browser. Badass hexadecimal words in leetspeak. A whole film shot in portrait mode. Christmas experiments.

Eye Candy

The Long Road from Selma to Montgomery

Worth Pondering

Totally Confused

Frozen apology, button-pushing robots, spider sense, decade-specific songs and the chart of the year.

Finally, women are making men smoke. Is there no end to this misandry? 🙂

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Well done yet again, humans. "The minimum count is 5.25 trillion plastic particles littering the seas"

How long has it been since the last great brand cock-up on social media? A week? Two? Step forward and take a bow, Best Buy, for upholding this noble tradition. Serial has been a phenomenon for at least four or five weeks now, so they must have carefully considered piggybacking on the podcast's popularity before tweeting this. Which is worse than just blaming an overenthusiastic intern.

"Recognising games as cultural products would untie the red-tape which unfairly prevents EU member state governments from supporting their national video game sectors," said Dr Richard Wilson, CEO of Tiga.

Getting traction for this in the near future might be difficult after the unflattering year for games culture GamerGate has delivered.

Slate does a bit of digging and discovers that the big brothers of GamerGaters are dominating Wikipedia

According to Buzzfeed it is #ChristmasJumperDay. What you do with this information depends entirely on your feelings about Christmas jumpers.

Eye Candy

2014: The Year In Photos, September- December

Worth Pondering

Totally Confused

Colbert as Legolas, Comfyballs, an imaginary Dublin, the pineapple express and teenagers really cannot spell cologne.

Finally, Man Blames Dog After Grenade Found in Shoebox

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Last call for letters to Santa.

The Internet's still pretty awful today, and still resistant to attempts to rein it in.

If there's any positive outcome from all of this, it's the brute-force reminder that we're all vulnerable in ways we don't even realize. The best we can do—the deeply imperfect solution we're left with—is to be aware of what we say at all times.

It's the mundane things in the Sony hack

Citizen journalism was one of the great dreams of the mid-2000s internet. Just as blogs had given anyone with an internet connection and a keyboard a platform, media companies like AOL and CNN hoped that cell phones and high-speed internet would transform an army of private citizens and online hobbyists into freelance, oftentimes pro bono writers, videographers, and reporters.

The frankly scary rise of the online vigilante

Only Facebook’s ill-advised intentional manipulation of users’ emotions could top the academic excitement generated in 2014 by an otherwise dry study that happened to catch fire thanks to a very snarky author comment.

“Should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?”

Eye Candy

Rollergirls and skateboarders

Worth Pondering

Totally Confused

Inside an octopus' mind, building a network using your customers, grotesquely violent Shakespeare, atheist discrimination and how to ask for a discount.

Finally, 'Why James Cameron’s Aliens is the best movie about technology'.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Amidst all the larger-scale awfulness …

“I mostly look for malfeasance by larger companies,” he said. “It certainly seems like a situation that could call for legal redress. But this is a small business in the town where I reside.”

How to be unnecessarily obnoxious over four dollars, by a Harvard Business School professor.

A Korean Air executive has resigned from some of her duties after she ordered a flight to be turned around to the gate and a flight attendant off the plane because she was served nuts in a bag instead of on a plate.

Nuts

Although gender inequality in the adult world continued to diminish between the 1970s and 1990s, the de-gendering trend in toys was short-lived. In 1984, the deregulation of children’s television programming suddenly freed toy companies to create program-length advertisements for their products, and gender became an increasingly important differentiator of these shows and the toys advertised alongside them. During the 1980s, gender-neutral advertising receded, and by 1995, gendered toys made up roughly half of the Sears catalog’s offerings—the same proportion as during the interwar years.

Things are worse now than fifty years ago

Jackie, the anonymous woman at the center of UVA’s ongoing rape scandal (and Rolling Stone’s ongoing journalism one), was unceremoniously outed on Twitter over the weekend — to the enormous consternation of tweeters on both sides of the U-Va. debate.

2014 Internet culture summed up

Still, it's not all bad. 126 million people have watched a YouTube video called 'People are awesome'. That must count for something, right?

Eye Candy

2014: The Year in Photos, May-August

Worth Pondering

Totally Confused

Mistletoe drone injury, horse-drawn ban, Black Twitter, women laughing alone with tablets and Christmas trees around the world.

Finally, if you install one app today, make it JakeDate. The hollowness of it all.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Happy new week, and welcome to the inadvertent surveillance edition.

Should our future robot overlords decide to write a history of how they overcame their human masters, late 2014 will be a key date in the timeline. Last week, an official report from the parliamentary intelligence and security committee handed over responsibility for the UK’s fight against terrorism, or at least part of it, to Facebook’s algorithms – the automated scripts that (among other things) look at your posts and your networks to suggest content you will like, people you might know and things you might buy.

Are you at risk from the anti-terrorism algorithms?

• When data gets creepy

Meanwhile in Ireland, 'State sanctions phone and email tapping'.

• 'Thoughts on Ireland's new Surveillance Order'

Too many surveillance programs to keep track of? Here are all the NSA revelations in one handy chart. Be prepared to be amazed!

The increasingly ugly Uber juggernaut rumbles on. The app has been banned in Delhi. As of yesterday Portland, Oregon is the latest city to sue the company.

Eye Candy

2014: The Year in Photos, January – April

Worth Pondering

Totally Confused

Wizard school, passive-aggressive shopping, Tom Baker versus Clem Fandango, pensive Biden and celebrity aliases.

Finally, if you're looking for Illuminati gifts, Etsy has you covered.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Clarification for any of you wondering about the subject line, today in Ireland is the almost-annual celebration of "The Money Was Just Resting In My Account" day.

• Context

Ad Hoc International Roundup

North Korea has sort of declared war on Seth Rogen. The Abu Dhabi police win the award for inappropriate musical choices for this CCTV footage of a murder suspect.

Internets

A long history of Reddit. A shorter history of and reflection on file formats. ReplyAll is a podcast about the Internet. The latest episode talks to the man who created the pop-up ad. Chart Brut: "why does the super-sophisticated conspiracy-troll machine draw diagrams like a 1st grader?" 'A Eulogy to ClipArt, In ClipArt'

Christmas Corner

Watch It's a Wonderful Life. Awww.

Eye Candy

Concept Currency

Worth Pondering

Totally Confused

100 years of beauty, fishing cheating, no brand monkeys, classic poems updated and the misery index.

Finally, the current LinkedIn Clem Fandango count stands at a paltry 2. This is disappointing. Do people not create spoof LinkedIn accounts?

Yours etc., @loughlin

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First things first. Start listening to this three hour retrospective of Chris Morris radio bits and pieces.

Bill Cosby, who knew? Tina Fey probably did.

Get ready for the season of New Year's resolutions early. Electroshock yourself to a
better you with this not-at-all-disturbing device.

Paddington’s story is that of the modern migrant. He is in many ways typical of my clients. This is more than a mere subtext to the film and it is, I hope, instructive to consider his tale from a legal perspective.

An immigration lawyer reviews Paddington.

Argentinian seagulls losing the run of themselves. Context.

Internets

Today in pointless headline seeking studies, 'The Global Geography of Internet Addiction'. None of the people surveyed come even close to actually living inside the Internet.

Eye Candy

Shark Cats

Worth Pondering

Totally Confused

Typography in Alien, Uberfacts still lies, winning the breakup, Whisper party and Internet Party USA.

Finally, Gene Simmons of Kiss fame was in the Dail yesterday.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Welcome to December! My attempt to remain ambivalent towards Christmas rather than grouchily disliking it was dealt a blow yesterday when the Spotify web player served up a selection of playlists with very punchable titles. Folksy Christmas! A Very Indie Christmas! Ugly Sweater Party! It may be a long December.

You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive

Anyway, Chris Rock did an interview with NYMag and it's really fantastic. On a similar theme

• 'The Science of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men'
• 'My Vassar College Faculty ID Makes Everything OK'
• Ferguson grand jury 'mistake'

Internets

Britain is set to be the first country where more than half the total advertising spend goes to digital channels. And they said this Internet thing wouldn't last, eh? Wikipedia has piles of cash yet still wants more. Speaking of (crypto)cash, this snarky take on a BitCoin convention in Las Vegas is a fun read.

Eye Candy

2014 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar

Worth Pondering

Christmas Corner

Inappropriate Santa. "A family claimed he told kids that he wasn't real, and then described the Sandy Hook massacre to them."

Number one on my Christmas list right now is this adorable crab robot.

Totally Confused

Screencap culture, breaking in jeans, generating journalism, Ryanair hell and the Cataquarium.

Finally, this Kickstarter. The rise of the concept hat has begun.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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