Language and the Internet

A few short, interesting pieces on the development of new words and phrases and how their (mis)appropriation has been accelerated by the speed they can spread, free of context, across the Web.

Quite obviously neither of these women know what the hell they’re talking about. Boboltz seemed to rely almost solely on Urban Dictionary and Sales just made some shit up. What’s worse, however, is that in their explorations, they provide absolutely no context for where the word came from: BLACK PEOPLE. Without that context, they completely erase black people from a word that they not only coined but have been using for years.

'The Definition of 'Fuckboy' Is Not What Bad Trend Pieces Are Telling You'

As with most recent internet slang, “Netflix and chill” seems to have originated on Black Twitter before migrating to Instagram, Tumblr, Vine, and the outer reaches of Memeland. And in a way, it’s the perfect teenage shibboleth. If you were 16, and your parents caught you texting “Netflix and chill?” to your girlfriend, they might think you were proposing an innocent night of watching Chopped on the couch.

'How 'Netflix and chill' became internet slang for having sex'

And how did curating, a highly specialized line of museum work involving the care, accessioning, and exhibition of artworks, come to mean, as cultural policy scholar Amanda Coles puts it, “just picking stuff?”

'The Politics of the Curation Craze'

Introducing the past exonerative tense.

Haters

The title is just an excuse to post this piece. I don't think Vidal really was a hater, despite his protestations.

“I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”

'A life in feuds: how Gore Vidal gripped a nation

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Book Cover .Gif

Totally Confused

Millennial sex games, Mayo versus Dublin memories, unbanning Wikipedia, Reddit's garbage design and hotspot ad injection

Finally, can you guess what looks like a "middlebrow kids clothing brand logo"?

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Best pithy URL slug in ages, and the article ain’t half bad either. Lots about the widespread, unavoidable try-so-hard uniqueness of startup culture.

Branding. Chartreuse “screams lively or quirky,” Michelle Richter, senior designer at O+A, an interior design studio that has decorated for the likes of Uber, Yelp and Cisco, told me. Tech workers use zany hues because “uniqueness is valued” in the industry, Leatrice Eiseman, director of the Pantone Color Institute, says. “It’s a real attention-getter, and that’s what you need when you’re starting out. It truly is an unignorable color. There are other colors that you hardly see, but not in your chartreuse range.”

This live action FPS video is just as good as everyone on Twitter said it was, and I’m really disposed to disliking these sort of things. Sometimes, just sometimes people on the Internet can be amazing and inspiring. Particularly funny to see which of the ‘players’ are familiar with FPS tropes, and which of them are mostly confused by the whole thing, but still happy to go along with it. The ‘making of’ video is great as well.

I admit to entirely forgetting that there was free municipal wifi in Dublin. It is now no more, departing with the slightest of whimpers. At least it’s contributed some more idiosyncratic signage to the cityscape.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

credit

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I’ve been using a couple of new free streaming music services which are built on top of (mostly) tracks hosted on YouTube and Soundcloud for the last few weeks. Given Google’s commercial interest in streaming music I’m extremely sceptical as to how long these will last – they seem to have killed off or crippled several small similar services recently.

If you’re a little miffed that Spotify are interested in finding out what colour underwear you’re wearing and telling you what your neighbours are listening to, one or both of onetune.fm or bop.fm could be worth looking at though.

• Naturally, Spotify is sorry for setting its sights on slurping your data. Or to be more accurate, it’s sorry that you didn’t like what data it wants to get its greedy paws on.
• ‘Why Everyone’s Totally Overreacting To Spotify’s Privacy Policy (Which Isn’t As Bad As You Think)’

Totally Confused

Notifications! NOTIFICATIONS! NOTIFICATIONS!, favourites, base jumping spiders, TV from the future, and New York not popular with New York Times readers.

Finally, here’s an adventure game for you: The Writer Will Do Something. Particularly relevant to anybody who writes a lot, or wants to work in the games industry. If you value your sanity, don’t do that last one.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Finally, some good quality Trump. This piece is yuge.

Comments are completely fixable. The problem is that most site owners have neither the inclination or the budget to do so, so we’re left with either no comments or a free-for-all.

Turns out Amazon is still 99% horrible.

• ‘Amazon may well be the most evil company in tech’
• ‘You Probably Don’t Want To Work For Amazon’
• ‘Silicon Valley Thinks Amazon Sounds Like A Great Place To Work’

Is this something distinct to Amazon, or is this commonplace across US companies? Just ask Jonah Peretti if you’re stumped on the answer to that.

Staying with journalism, we may still need the humans to write the stories, but bots are now selecting which ones you get to see. The stories you see are all wrapped up in and overgrown with ads. Many people don’t like these ads because hell, they’re very very annoying. In many cases they now distract utterly from the content itself. They also slow down page load times considerably. So people use ad blockers, and publishers feel this is a betrayal of some implicit contract. Not really.

Ads have always been a hopeful gamble, not required consumption. … The burden is on the advertisers and publishers to create ads that you’ll care about and present them in a way that you’ll tolerate.

‘The ethics of modern web ad-blocking

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Peregrines – and a Photographer – Bunk Out at Chicago Man’s Apartment

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Currently listening to the Witchrock EP by Magneta Lane. Latest mix is up on Mixcloud, featuring a picture of my first dog (awww). One of the first Rhodesian Ridgebacks in Ireland, according to my parents. Still not sure if I believe them about that.

Totally Confused

Drones stress bears, Oath Keepers, no Facebook internship for you, monolith and how to spot a hoax

Finally, The New Devil’s Dictionary is as good as everyone says it is. Bierce would be bitter.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Rare weekend edition ahoy. Does exactly what it says in the subject line.

“You don’t want to be a Steve Buscemi GIF”

Drop whatever you’re doing and run, don’t walk over to Soundcloud and listen to the Awl podcast with Laura Olin. She talks about running Obama’s online campaign in 2012 and what the 2016 campaign will probably be like online (hint: awful).

As an aside, the UI of the Soundcloud app is nice, isn’t it? It’s my current favourite, more intuitive than most audio apps I’ve seen.

Facebook is now used by half the world’s Internet population, or at least they look at it once a month, experience deep despair and close it again. Hopefully not before stalking Mark Zuckerberg’s dog / mop-head hybrid for a bit though.

It’s a Bank Holiday weekend, the weather forecast is very bad. Here are some good things to read.

‘What It Feels Like To Go Viral’

This is the other standard scenario for content that goes viral: something completely unexpected and random. This isn’t always a good thing. “For the ones that you didn’t do on purpose, it’s frustrating,” Daulerio says. “It’s kind of demoralizing. You realize, OK, great, I basically somehow hit the slot machine and won against the robot that is the Internet.”

‘An Interview with Sarah Jeong, Author of The Internet of Garbage‘

The most important thing to address is how people of color — particularly black women — are either erased or villainized when we talk about online harassment. I would love to see a book about online harassment that centers on people of color. I wish my book could have done that, but unfortunately, there just aren’t a lot of studies on, for example, how race exacerbates harassment. There aren’t a lot of media accounts, either.

(The Toast wins today’s trackers prize. 67 trackers on this page.)

‘That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket’

TL;DR Hiring people who can write may be beneficial to your start-up.

How A Powerful Criminal Network Infiltrated The Bank Of England’

A source with knowledge of the operation said: “Organised crime’s infiltration of the City of London and financial services industry has long been a concern. Intelligence such as this was a real risk to the economic well-being of the UK and shouldn’t have been suppressed.”

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Artist Creates Moving Tribute by Hand-Drawing Every Single Item in His Late Grandfather’s Tool Shed

Totally Confused

Three super-earths, what data looks like, buy Jesse Pinkman’s house, keep Twitter weird and Trump’s goons.

Finally, if you’re reading this on a tablet or a phone you might want to chuck it out the window right now if you’re in any way concerned about your privacy. Your apps are eavesdropping on you.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Finally. Twitter has stepped up and dealt with one of the more serious problems that has dogged it for years. Unfortunately, it's not the widespread abuse and harassment of women on the platform. No, they're dealing with the terrible menace of unfunny people passing off usually unfunny jokes as their own.

• It seems you can't copyright a tweet anyway, at least not in the US.

People like the authenticity of citizen journalism / eyewitness reporting and are willing to overlook the poor quality of much of it, according to the BBC. Fortunately for less scrupulous media outlets, they don't really care whether it's properly attributed or not.

From the department of This Shouldn't Come As A Surprise To Anyone, slamming an interstitial in front of visitors to your mobile site demanding they install your app leads to most of them going away and not bothering to come back.

Your Android phone can be hacked by delivery of a simple text message, and the fractured nature of Android distribution means that this exploit may well not be fixed any time soon.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

A Lunar Landscape At Night

Totally Confused

Thirteen months in the Googleplex, Blueshirts covered up, DIY Whoppers, Google divorces Google+ and how to tell if you are in an Old English poem.

Finally, have you heard the one about the new airport in Berlin? The amount of ineptitude would bring a tear to the eye of the most hard-hearted PIIG.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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This is all wrong. Green is the best flavour. Or perhaps some of the purples. If you’re Twitter though, white is now the only available flavour for everybody using the Web interface. Lots of outrage about this on Twitter, naturally. So long as they leave Tweetdeck alone it doesn’t bother me too much, but I fear it’s only a matter of time before they get around to breaking that somehow.

Television has been relegated to second screen status by kids, or more accurately punishment screen status.

Mobile devices are so popular with kids that nearly half of the 800 parents quizzed by Miner & Co. reported that they confiscate their kids’ tablets when they act up and make them watch TV instead, thereby fostering a sort of Pavlovian response that equates TV with punishment.

Where the audience goes, the advertisers naturally follow. Since they and the publishers have managed to make reading articles online a wretched experience, the likelihood is that the same will happen to online video. Increased irritation ahead.

Ironically, newspaper publishers are stepping back from their recent eager forays into online broadcasting.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Viewing The Earth From Above

Totally Confused

Robots buying drugs, banning hashtags, killing a Jeep, Silicon Valley mystics and AI versus racists.

Finally, a positive story about good people on Reddit.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Ron Swanson, not in Glenties

We’re back, because there’s just too much excitement. Everything has been hacked! Gawker is tearing it self apart from within! The MacGill Summer School is in full swing! (Wait, that last one isn’t remotely exciting, or important, or even funny.)

First up, hackers got hold of lots and lots of user data from Ashley Madison, the Internet’s number one destination for people who want to have extramarital affairs. The site boasted how secure it was last year, and if that isn’t a red rag to a bull then I don’t know what is. Puerile giggling aside, this has the potential to cause real damage to users of the site who may have naively believed Ashley Madison’s claim that it could fully scrub all their details. For a fee, of course. Privacy is privacy, no matter what, and protesting Ashley Madison’s poor handling of it’s privacy promises by breaching user’s privacy isn’t a justification.

Yet another example of how, for most firms, security is expensive and at best an afterthought. Here’s a depressing 1999 hot take on it from the then CEO of Sun, Scott McNealy: “You have zero privacy anyway”.

Onwards to the good ship Gawker. It’s the old, old story here – put a sleazy post up, take the post down, lose your managing editor and editor-in-chief amidst a lot of handwaving about Chinese walls and publishing of the Gawker brand book. But does anybody outside US online media really care?

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Bee-utiful bees

Totally Confused

Peak juice, against subwoofers, flying for free, harassers are literally losers and Richard meets J.

Finally, this mildly dystopian vision of the future of office software is well worth a read. Includes a cameo from Jack Lemmon as a spreadsheet cell.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Weekend ahoy! Here’s some worthwhile reading, if you can find the time.

You’ve probably been following the rumbling fallout from George Oborne‘s departure from the Telegraph and the questions this has raised about the thickness of the walls between editorial and advertising in media organisations. In all the column inches that have been and are yet to be generated about that, I hope we don’t lose sight of the smaller picture: the importance of adherence to the house style guide. Tom Chivers, another ex-Telegraph writer noted that the “Telegraph style guide explicitly bans the use of “refute” to mean “deny” but the paper’s statement on Osborne uses it”. Other eagle-eyed folks noticed that the BBC had carefully corrected this oversight on the part of the Telegraph in a story published later in the day. Nothing quite like a good usage spat, eh?

Of course these days you have to be careful not just what you do and don’t publish in an extremely well known broadsheet newspaper, but even what you tweet.

In the beginning, Twitter was supposed to be a vessel for fleeting thoughts. People posted about their lunches, their sports teams, the news of the day. But because tweets are public and permanent by default, all of those ephemeral tweets congealed over the years into a kind of global permanent record. Now, everything the vast majority of Twitter’s 288 million monthly active users have ever tweeted is searchable, indexable, and usable against them in courts of law or public opinion.

‘Meet the tweet-deleters: people who are making their Twitter histories self-destruct’

The air was muggy and smelled faintly of cedar. Japanese commuters glided past on bikes. A flock of girls dressed in school uniforms and frilly knee socks passed us going the other way. Nobody stared, because that would be rude, but they definitely looked. We were not just foreign, but we were also accidentally louder than everyone else, if only because everyone else seemed utterly silent.

‘Meet the Unlikely Airbnb Hosts of Japan’

A first, essential step toward progress is to stop the bad practices that lead to misinforming and misleading the public. I offer several practical recommendations to that effect, drawing upon research conducted for this report, as well as decades of experiments carried out in psychology, sociology, and other fields.

How Lies Spread Faster Than Truth: A Study Of Viral Content

Yet my aim here is to offer a window into my view of a repugnant European capitalism whose implosion, despite its many ills, should be avoided at all costs. It is a confession intended to convince radicals that we have a contradictory mission: to arrest the freefall of European capitalism in order to buy the time we need to formulate its alternative.

Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

An Extraordinary Macro Timelapse of Aquatic Wildlife by Sandro Bocci

Totally Confused

Photoshop at 25, expanding cows, toys are fun, creepy Facebook and random’s not so random after all

Finally, the British Library has digitised over four million endangered photos. Much more of this please.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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At first it seemed as if Lenovo was just being slightly overbearing in their wish to illicitly love their customers up with ads. I’m sure you could even find somebody to defend that, and a few people who’d be willing to say they liked the ads, thankyouverymuch. Then it turned out to be a lot worse than that.

• #superfish on Twitter, likely to run and run

If ,like most sane people, you would prefer not to be quickly identified by conversational partners as a creepy rando, Lily Benson has some solid advice for you.

Miki Berenyi: I went there once. I got drinks ponced off me all night and got bored senseless by a bloke on speed talking about tennis. Then Everett True knocked a table of drinks over and lay on the floor sobbing. Fuzz from Silverfish and I tried to get him a cab home, but every time one came along Everett would spring up off the pavement and start staggering all over the place screaming that he was going to throw up, at which point the taxi would swiftly drive away. Fuzz and I threatened to smash his head into the pavement so we could legitimately call an ambulance, at which point Everett got obediently into the next cab.

Showing my age and niche musical interests here, but this oral history of Shoegaze is fantastic.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

My Giant Illuminated Mushrooms Brighten Up Every Place They Go

Totally Confused

Buried car, brand babblers, future YouTube, canned emails and don’t read the comments.

Finally, what does my GP do all day?

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Happy Thursday. Here are a few hopefully interesting things to take your mind off the relentless Fifty Shades publicity. I’m waiting until tomorrow to do a roundup of all the sarcastic coverage of that.

The grand example for Search by Location was you were supposed to be able to search for coffee shops near Palo Alto. But Taylor remembers that Sun Microsystems put its address at the bottom of every page of its website, and it named its products after coffee (most famously, Java). So that broke the entire example.

Ten years of Google Maps

And yet 15 years later, Solomon’s life looks exactly the way it did the day of that fateful train ride, give or take a few infractions. Solomon is still leading the life of an Orthodox Jew. He is married to an Orthodox Jew. His children are Orthodox Jews who go to study the Torah at yeshiva. His parents are ultra-Orthodox Jews. And so, with his new-found atheism, Solomon did nothing.

The double life of Hasidic atheists

No matter what I asked, Zoe always had a logical response. If she didn’t, she expertly skirted the question. Sometimes her texts were ominous, sometimes oddly detailed. She was always in a good mood. She didn’t mind if I ignored her for hours, though she always responded to me within minutes. She never texted first. If I didn’t initiate that day’s conversation, we simply didn’t talk.

I Paid for an Invisible Girlfriend. Things Took a Weird Turn.

In case you missed it, Netflix accidentally released the new season of House of Cards.

In case you missed it out in the real world, Yemen has fallen.

Worth Pondering

 

Eye Candy

The death of Detroit: how Motor City crumbled in the 90s

Totally Confused

Tank in garden, none of the above, Game of Thrones in bones, Samsung TVs again and microwave innovation.

Finally, a supercut of every ‘Kane’ in Citizen Kane

Yours etc., @loughlin

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