The Minions movie spent a whopping $593 million on an unprecedented, practically inescapable, wildly successful marketing campaign, translating into huge profits for Universal. And, of course, for extremist militant group ISIS.
You’ve probably never heard of Bella and the Bulldogs, a relatively new show on Nickelodeon about a perky cheerleader-turned-quarterback. It’s fairly popular among tweens and has just been renewed for a second season. It’s also popular among infuriated, far right-wing racists, who have become positively obsessed with the show’s supposedly anti-white “race cuckoldry.”
Over the weekend, Reddit’s users had themselves a fit, shutting down almost all of the major subreddits and likening the site’s interim CEO, Ellen Pao, to as many genocidal dictators as they could manage. Now, Pao has come to the message board on bended knee to offer up a mea culpa of her own. And it’s a bad one.
Remember planking? Remember how tired and unfunny it got in such a short amount of time? Thanks to Vice co-founder and anthropomorphized subreddit Gavin McInnes, the terrible internet trend of our past is back. And this time, it’s here to speak out against the atrocious shaming and reverse racism currently oppressing the country’s white males. Or something.
Artificial neural networks—systems of interconnected processors that attempt to mimic the structure of the human brain—are usually used for things like facial recognition. Feed a neural network enough photos of your own face, and soon enough, it will learn your dimples, your chin, the distance between your eyes—and be able to recognize those things the next time it sees you, just like a toddler would. But as a handful of researchers have shown recently, there’s no reason neural networks can’t also approximate the brain’s weirder and more creative processes—processes like dreaming.
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Let’s say you’re a straight woman who just moved to New York. You’d like to meet a guy, but your friend circle is too small for set you up; you hate the bar scene; and you can’t seem to get a match on Tinder. In your dark night of the soul, searching for any connection at all, you turn to the Craigslist personals. Among the first posts you come across is from a self-described 27-year-old “single guy with no kids, living and working in the city.” It is headlined: “GOT BOOBS?”
Everybody may poop, but there’s one, extra special corner of Amazon where everybody doesn’t just poop—they poop like goddamn clockwork. And they’re more than happy to share their shadooby-stained tales of nature’s call. A call they owe entirely to the laxative tea that they bought for their—uh, wives. Sure, yes. Their wives.
The ‘90s, wow. Remember them? Simpler times, when kids had NSYNC and BSB instead of T-Swift and 1D, Yak Baks instead of Yik Yak, and good cartoons instead of bad ones. Cal Ripken, Moesha, Melissa Joan Hart. Chores. Allowance. Nickelodeon Magazine, Please! Remember? Do you? Well here’s a quiz that will definitely take you back. Which of these beloved ‘90s characters can you recognize and name?
YouTube, in addition to being a renowned cesspool of virulently racist and misspelled comments, hosts videos. Many of these videos seek to shed light on the many secrets that the sheeple of the world would keep locked behind closed doors. And almost every single one of them is absolutely, phenomenally, mind-numbingly insane.
Reddit took its first baby steps toward cutting down on harassment this week, banning five small subreddits built on personal attacks. That should have been a fairly uncontroversial move, but this is Reddit—and the admins’ good intentions have inevitably paved the road to a insane, sexist, Nazi-themed tantrum taking over the site’s top posts.
Thanks to the magic of things like light sensors and accelerometers, it’s possible to turn nearly anything into a musical instrument. Next up: screenprinted pieces of paper.
Reddit, a 10-year-old internet community with 3.3 million users, somehow just got around to announcing an anti-harassment policy last month. Now the site, which usually leaves moderation decisions up to the community, has taken its first stab at banning pernicious subreddits under the new rules. Five subreddits have been shuttered by reddit admins “based on their harassment of individuals,” the Reddit team announced Wednesday.
No matter how much the internet may change over the years, there are at least two constants: absurd flame wars, and the wildly specific message boards from which they’re wrought. Perhaps the greatest of these virtual cesspools is Clown-Forum.com, a forum for clowns.
The Kremlin’s network of professional propaganda-spewing internet trolls is large. According to one former insider, there are thousands of Russians who work full-time jobs publishing social media updates, internet comments, and blog posts specifically designed to foment hatred for the U.S. and support for the Russian government. And their trolling may not be limited to the web, or to Russian soil.
For about the first 15 seconds of Bob and Bev Holwager’s rendition of “Blank Space,” you figure you’re watching a pretty ordinary fan-made Taylor Swift video. The background graphics are pretty trippy, yes, but you’ve seen weirder. Then the squished-up sports car drives past the ancient ruins and a rose-hued mushroom cloud rises on the horizon.
Want to create a Wikipedia article about yourself, or edit the article that’s already out there to make yourself look better? Go ahead: Wikipedia policy discourages the practice, but there’s nothing really stopping you, especially if you’re working from an anonymous IP address. Anyone can do it—even parliamentary staffers.
Happy Memorial Day. For some reason, instead of having fun outside with your friends, you are alone in front of your computer, reading a blog post. Maybe you didn’t get the day off work, or maybe you’re hung over. That’s OK. You can celebrate the Memorial Days of 1983, 1986, 1988, and 1992—all thanks to YouTube’s bountiful archives of perfect, vintage, unwatched home video.
