Today was the day the marriage equality referendum in Ireland kicked off in earnest. The first day in the office for many was made a little bit special by the circulation on Twitter of a leaflet of unknown origin which had some thoughts on sodomy.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls… pic.twitter.com/3vOxX1itn8 HT @FintanOToolbox @TaraFlynn #soundsofsodomy
— Matt Kirshen (@mattkirshen) January 5, 2015
The hashtag #soundsofsodomy trended (of course it did)
In an illustrious start to the new year the Indo ran piece on its website last night headlined ‘Reboot Ireland: Musician Jim Corr to ‘stand strong’ with Lucinda Creighton – despite dubbing politician ‘too crazy’ just weeks ago‘. The piece has since been removed. This action was presumably taken when someone became aware that the Twitter account the quotes were sourced from (@therealjimcorr) was a parody account.
Keep up the good work Indo!
[8tracks width=”600″ height=”500″ playops=”” url=”http://8tracks.com/mixes/1495604″]
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.
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.
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.
The Long Road from Selma to Montgomery
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.
2014: The Year In Photos, September- December
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?”
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.
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?
2014: The Year in Photos, May-August
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?
Meanwhile in Ireland, 'State sanctions phone and email tapping'.
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.
2014: The Year in Photos, January – April
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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