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☆ Want You To Know: I Strictly Roots

UK Politics Roundup

Should you change your password? Or should you wait? Or should you not bother? Exactly how long should you wait? Who should you tell about your new password? Should you use your Yahoo! email to tell people you have or haven't changed your password?

Other Internet (And Ting)

Dropbox announces it has 275 million users, a $10bn valuation and almost 700 employees. There's also an Android version of Mailbox available with a desktop version on the way. Surely they must be considering becoming evil sometime soon? They've achieved the required scale.

Silicon Valley start-up sexism on Secret.

In The Year 2121, Or Thereabouts

What we will all be reading by firelight in our caves while sheltering from the drone swarms. Which will be controlled by furiously nodding Octopus Raft-wearing robots.

Definitely Worth Pondering

Totally Confused, Video Edition

James Of Thrones, Werner Herzog on chickens, 'Requiem For A Studio Guitar Player, 'Like A Rolling Sex Machine', and an invisible car

Today's worst attempt at being controversial.

Song for the day is 'Uptown Top Ranking' by Anthea and Donna, as obliquely referenced a bit above.

☆ Want You To Know: Whatever Happened To ‘Winter Is Coming’?

Game of Thrones returns for it's fourth season this weekend. It seems old habits die hard and 'sexposition' is still an important narrative device. If you've forgotten what's happened up until now, here's a decent recap. As that one is in traditional text format, for good measure here's a recap that uses emoji. 14 most brutal deaths in Game of Thrones as 8-bit GIFs. And finally, 'If The Media Reported The Events Of "Game Of Thrones"'.

Internet

Crowdfunding game of the day: Kickstarter simulator 2015.

Glass is 'merely descriptive', so no patent for you, Google. At least not yet. Yelp reviews might be a bit dodgy. As if that possibility has never occurred to anyone before.

At the start of this week I had heard the name James Franco, but didn't really know who he was. Then the Internet told me he was mostly a creep, and who was I to disagree? Now, at the end of this week it turns out he just has some product to promote.

Local flavour alert. An Irish Farmer's Journal piece about the County Kildare geep is spreading rapidly ('going viral', as many twits are still fond of saying).

To Ponder, Or Not To Ponder?

Very Important Documentary Film

'Catnip: Egress to Oblivion?' [YT]

Art Corner

George Bush paints other world leaders.

JENNA: You think you got to the soul of you?

GEORGE: You're going to have to ask other people who know me better, such as yourself. This is an improvement of the first one I did of myself.

'Two Monks Invent Renaissance Art'

Totally Confused, Mostly Long Video Edition

Books versus movies, Tyrion Lanister slapping Joffrey for ten hours, shrinking women, Hurtigruten timelapse, and fifty years of James Bond.

Cover version of the day: 'Wave of Mutilation', Kristin Hersh

☆ Want You To Know: Underground Overground

Internets Updates

Lego, Tool of Satan.

Brendan Eich has previous form in giving money to fringe right-wing groups.

Mike Judge's new show about Silicon Valley culture is called, umm, 'Silicon Valley'. Warning: that article is likely to bring back memories of the awfulness that was the Randi Zuckerberg-produced 'Start-Ups: Silicon Valley'.

Bottom half of the Internet highlight of the day #1: 'The Economist' publishes a nice profile remembering Frankie Knuckles. Commenters start to squabble amusingly over the origins of jazz.

Bonus Frankie Knuckles from 1986 [YT].

Bottom half of the Internet highlight of the day #2: How to explain Bitcoin to a visiting alien.

Well, what we do is we take some black rocks or gas and burn it to boil water, or we flood an area and run water through a small spot, this is all so we get these magnets to turn even if they don't want to. Then we bake sand in to very intricate shapes, which also takes a lot of that fresh-squeezed magnet juice we were talking about earlier. So you put all that magnet-juice in to the sand, and you get certain numbers, and these numbers can be exchanged for food because… well as you can see the numbers are really hard to get! So we figure they must be worth a lot of food.

Worth Pondering

Oireland

According to the Irish Sun, the end may be nigh for TV3. Probably hastened by the impending appearance of a better-funded competitor in the shape of UTV Ireland. Of course, TV3 have been quick to deny this.

Irish media and development agencies, please stop cramming 'Silicon Valley' into soundbites and headlines. We've had fifteen years of it and it really hasn't happened yet.

Totally Confused

FiveThirtyEight.com has a look at the Bechdel Test, Bebo has a video messaging app and it is called Blab, The Gish Gallop, Washington D.C. snowy owl flies again after successful wing repair and digital dinosaurs.

Today's recommended version of David Bowie's 'Heroes / Helden' is by Nena [YT]

☆ Want You To Know: It’s Safe To Come Out Now

It’s Safe To Come Back Out Now

April Fool’s day has thankfully passed without any major casualties. Disappointingly The Onion still refuse to publish only actual news stories on April Fool’s day.

To celebrate surviving April Fool’s day, I recommend playing this highly topical and informative clicking game that will tell you everything you need to know about Bitcoin. Then have a giggle at this journo who was caught looking at dogs on the Internet when he should have been looking at footballers.

Many people have been in this meeting [YT], which is doing the rounds at the moment. People who have not been in that meeting may suspect that it’s an April Fool’s prank. It isn’t. It is horrifyingly accurate.

Keep Your Bible Close To Your Crest

Someone went on a crashing spree through whatever it is Trinity has decided to call itself and then proceeded up Dawson Street, with continued crashing all the while. There were inevitable rumours that the perpetrator may have been upset at the university’s decision to remove the bible from its crest as part of the rebranding. This has to be unlikely, but you can’t keep a good rumour down.

What was also notable was the difficulty some media outlets had in even roughly estimating how old the front gates of Trinity actually are. Hint: it’s not 1500 years.

Known Unknowns

A properly long read, ‘The Certainty Of Donald Rumsfeld‘ from the New York Times. Part 1, 2, 3, 4.

For more long reads and different opinions, keep an eye on Buzzfeed Ideas which has only just launched but looks like it could be an interesting part of the Buzzfeed project.

Anniversaries

The Matrix is 15 years old. I actually would have guessed it came out longer ago than that.

Gmail is 10 years old.

Totally Random, Food Edition

Kit-Kats you bake, burgers you smash, ranch dressing you can swim in, pizza for breakfast and general food eye-candy.

Bonus KitKat. (This one’s about Android, not chocolate.)

Today’s recommended version of David Bowie’s ‘Heroes / Helden’ is by Andrea Schroeder [YT].

Want You To Know: Barbies And Bots

Monday Morning internets

A couple of pieces on the twin engines of eyeball driving, Buzzfeed and Upworthy. The Upworthy piece is longer and is almost enough to make you lose your cynicism about those cunning, laughable and highly successful headlines. Buzzfeed trawling through Whisper’s database of secrets sounds like it could definitely be successful. Who doesn’t love a bit of anonymous gossip?

Speaking of Buzzfeed, keep taking those quizzes. Though do remember, kids, that

willingly giving away lots of information about your personal preferences to a media company might not be the best idea.

Somehow I missed this satisfyingly snarky headline from El Reg a few days back: Google wearables: A solution looking for a rich nerd. Yes, just perhaps the market for wearables in their current form isn’t as big as some fans would like to think.

To Ponder

On Barbie

For some reason or other, several Barbie related things today. Extreme Barbie jeep racing [YT playlist]. “Barbie … has not, to my knowledge, cosplayed as Brienne of Tarth until now.”. A Kickstarter for a project to produce 3D printed armour for Barbie. Yes indeed. This of course comes soon after the news that Lammily, AKA normal Barbie has been funded and will be hitting the toy shop shelves. No doubt there is a movement already underway to denounce Lammilies as ‘not normal’.

B-b-b-bitcoin

If Bitcoins were around in the 90s [YT]. Because they’re not going away you know. They just keep getting lost, and found, and then lost again.

History Lesson / Movie Plug

But in the summer of 1984, a group of gay and lesbian activists in London, at a time when the AIDS issue was seeing prejudices come to the fore, decided to raise money to support the families of striking miners.

Pits and Perverts

Totally Confused

‘Are Trout South African?’, Wikipedia is being edited by bots, humans are creating playlists, drones are saving humans and a hybrid human.

Weekend edition

Video menagerie: Magic for dogs. Molting tarantula. Puzzled penguins.

Whilst mostly ignoring all the media brouhaha about flight MH370, I found this piece fascinating. There’s remote and then there’s remote. “There are two bicycles to ride, a soccer field and a slow Internet connection.” If you fancying reading one other piece about lost planes, make it this one by Michelle Read.

Interested in knowing what teenagers are doing online and whether it will bring about the downfall of society as we know it (hint: no it won’t, just like rock ‘n’ roll didn’t)? Danah Boyd thinks about this and other interesting things a lot, and here’s a Q&A she did with Nick Bilton.

The New Yorker does a brief history of techno. Definitely wouldn’t have expected to see that a decade ago. Perhaps two decades ago, considering how long techno has been around now. Still, artists and audiences alike continue to innovate.

Protip of the day: if you’re leaking your employer’s confidential information, it is best not to use their email service to do so.

Somewhat related, Cloak is an anti-social network, or something like that. It uses Instagram and Foursquare location data to let you know when your contacts are nearby. You can then take the appropriate measures to avoid them if you so wish.