First, a #ShirtStorm update!

Serial. Serial Serial Serial.

It's the golden days of radio all over again and the salvation of the content 'industry' or something. Serial

I finally caught up with the long form This American Life-birthed podcast over the weekend. It's very well crafted and captivating. I'm hooked. Of course, I'm not the only one.

Before Serial was international news, Reddit was rapidly on the case. Reddit being Reddit, some people promptly set about attempting to doxx the characters in the story. The admins of the Reddit board attempted to stop this and seem to have been mostly successful. That was until the Daily Mail decided that it was in the public interest for it to do so after the latest episode. You stay classy, Daily Mail.

• Podcast about the podcast, from the AV Club
• Parodies of the podcast
• Puns about the podcast

In other serious online content news, both The Onion and Funny Or Die are up for sale.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Auroras

Totally Confused

Bread, burgers, bros, bullets and just plain ol' bad.

Sportsing Video Corner: The Bad And The Good

The FIFA Files. Manuel Neuer

Finally, do you compulsively self-edit as you type? This tool will probably do one of two things for you: help solve this problem or drive you demented. You have been warned.

@loughlin

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It seems parts of the Internet experienced a sudden outbreak of adlessness on Wednesday. I can't say I noticed because cough Adblock, but interesting nonetheless.

In comet updates, the silly bearded scientist attempted to make the comet landing all about his silly sexist shirt. Not really, but as an antidote to that silliness, here's This Is What A Scientist Looks Like

Without diving too far back into the mess that is GamerGate, here's a guy that people hate a lot more than the silly scientist, and rightly so.

Back In The Real World

More than four hundred people have visited a health centre for screening for blood-borne viruses after 22,000 dental patients were recalled … Doug Black, medical director for NHS England in Nottinghamshire, said it was the "largest recall in NHS history".

Dentist Desmond D'Mello investigation: Screening for blood-borne viruses begins

• The Dirty History of Doctor's Hands
  (This is from a lovely-looking new quarterly called Method.)

Paul Mason of Channel 4 has a superb rant about banks and their ongoing misdemeanours here.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

A Beijing Facelift

Totally Confused

Aging boy band members, 'Let It Goat', always-clean lettuce, chainsaw in pants and lumbersexuals.

Finally, make your Wikipedia browsing much slicker with WikiWand. Seriously, it's great and will make you read even more Wikipedia articles that are not immediately relevant to your interests than ever before.

Yours weekendingly, @loughlin

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Well done primates. The best thing to come out of humans landing a robot on a comet so far is this adorable video of Rosetta and Philae.

• Also, the comet sings

Internets

YouTube launches its paid music service. Amazingly, Ireland is one of the first countries it is being rolled out to. Twitter can silence obnoxious eejits if they want to, but is this the way they should go about it? Meanwhile, Twitter seems to have forgotten that they used to provide Google with their firehose and tweets showed up in Google real-time search results.

General techbros

The meritocratic glow of Silicon Valley is so frustrating. It creates a pass for people who use things like the "culture" filter. What's the culture filter? An easy excuse to be prejudiced. It's culture bias, like [not hiring someone] because they didn't like Animal Collective as much as you do? Seriously.

Race in Silicon Valley

Could we possibly see a new category of awards in games development, Best Glitches? Some of these from Assassin's Creed Unity are the stuff of nightmares.

Worth Pondering

Pedantry alert. This is not a selfie.

Eye Candy

Double exposures by Julia Fullerton Batten

Totally Confused

3D print yourself for love, a computer that writes folk music, the other side of Internet fame, women not as creepy as men and Orwellian

Finally, vote for Steph Roche in FIFA's Puskas awards if you're so inclined. A nation once again!

Yours as always, @loughlin

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The crew manning the Katie Hopkins Klaxon is still being kept busy. 78% of Mirror readers think she's gone too far. For Hopkins, that is presumably mission accomplished.

• Who said it: Katie Hopkins or Stormfront?
• Katie Hopkins and the Dangers of Obverse Journalism
• A collection of probably made-up Richard Madeley quotes

Inviting the Internet to 'meme' you is probably never a good idea, especially if you're Bill Cosby and you have multiple allegations of rape and sexual assault following you around.

I think that everybody sexts. Not everyone sends nude photos, of course, for a variety of reasons. But many people I’ve talked to define a sext as anything sent with sexual intent, be it a suggestive Gchat exchange, a racy photo, a suggestive Snapchat, or even those aqua-blue droplets of sweat emoji.

Everybody sexts

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Chuck Anderson

Totally Confused

Mayonnaise wars, 600 years of selfies, DogVaCay, vacation breasts and wacky world leader costumes.

Finally, from the 'it can't possibly be any good' desk, the Game of Thrones video game.

Yours as always, @loughlin

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“I fly all around the world and go to conferences.” Let that sink in, because it doesn’t seem to be part of a parody, or an excerpt from a conference logistics workers’ diary but an actual part of an actual New Yorker profile. Still, “like Phyliss Diller or Beetlejuice” is one hell of a hairstyle.

Facebook seems to feel it deserves some kind of cookie for giving its users a smidgen more control over what updates they see, from entities whose updates they’ve decided they want to see.

Obligatory link to ‘Too Many Cooks’.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy, Berlin Mauerfall Edition

The 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down was celebrated at the weekend. There were many balloons involved.

• InFocus, ‘The Berlin Wall, 25 Years After the Fall’
• A History of the Berlin Wall through maps
• The Berlin Wall of Sound
• ‘Why the fall of the Berlin Wall led to the world we know today’
• ‘Our own private Germany’

Totally Confused

Hiding in plain e-sight, an accurate org chart, Orwell trending in Egypt, a truly disturbing Vine and a humiliated grammar bully

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Did you know there were extremely posh corners of the Internet, and you're not invited? Unless you can stump up the cash, of course.

The Feds are looking for more from Facebook, while Twitter belatedly does something about it's rather large harassment issues. Asking someone else to take care of it for you is better than nothing, I suppose.

Meanwhile, in surprising news, Buzzfeed doesn't do clickbait. Apparently.

• Clickbait PhD

The Internet Of Things (That Shout At You Or Watch You)

Somebody, somewhere might have naked pictures of you that your own machines have taken. Now you can buy yet another device that will shout instructions at you. Thanks Amazon, hope it works out as well as your phone …

• Extra Echo

Oireland

Regarding the ECB letters, and the general shenanigans back then, this is worth revisiting.

The effect of this fantasy is plain to see in TV3’s The Apprentice, a brilliant satire on what now passes for an Irish business culture, a world where commitment, hunger and determination (all synonyms for wanting) are valued above skill, intelligence or any other real-world attribute.

Fergal Crehan, from 2010.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Movie title typos, illustrated. London, Instagrammed and timelapsed.

Totally Confused

My name is NOT Elizabeth Gallagher, Facebook, you're NOT my mother, no dog walking for you, no smart phone and just stop looking at your phone.

Finally, which lemur are you?

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Took a mini-break from the newsletter earlier this week so I could pay attention to the stream of breathless tweets emerging from the Web Summit. People were impressed by a bridge made from shipping containers, balloons, everything a man from Twitter said, and just the overall humblingness of being there.

People were less impressed by the sad old conference reliables of misogyny, poxy WiFi and the discriminatory caste system when it came to getting free grub.

All of this was eclipsed by renaissance man Enda Kenny and his “Dig-ee-taaahl Sum-maht” song and dance routine (watch the hand!)

Bonus Summit: Can you solve a hurdle?

Anyway, that will all be over soon. If you read just one thing this week, make it ‘The Sixth Stage of Grief is Retro-Computing. It’s a really poignant and beautiful piece of writing.

Won’t Somebody Think Of The Intelligence Agencies?

Spying is hard. It’s just plain mean to make spying harder by not handing information over to spies.

• Doc Searls on what a nice social network might look like
• What’s the use of worrying anyway, as it turns out your TV is watching you, unblinkingly

For relaxing times, make it Suntory time

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Kowloon cross section

Totally Confused

Better security questions, Tupperware empire, the 36 people who run Wikipedia, why innocent people plead guilty and how murderers use Facebook.

Finally, in absurd Kickstarters that will probably go on to be incredibly successful because what do I know, Mousr! In fact, it’ll probably end up on a future edition of this list.

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source

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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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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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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