We Love the Internet 2019/48: The Style is an algorithm edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Streaming TV’s Battle of the Binge: “Burn” All Episodes or Take a “Weekly Pulse”?
• What I learned from getting scammed by 12-year-olds
• Dril didn’t sell out you sold out
• How one company you’ve never heard of swallowed tens of thousands of text messages – then spit them back out

Reference points:

• Lists: The 2010 decade
• Net positive
• Kurt Vonnegut Diagrams the Shape of All Stories in a Master’s Thesis Rejected by U. Chicago
• State of Play: Six Trends Revolutionizing Games
• 10 Great Infographics by XKCD’s Randall Munroe

Longer reads:

• Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan
• Nowthis News and the politics of social video
• How A Massive Facebook Scam Siphoned Millions Of Dollars From Unsuspecting Boomers
• Inside Facebook’s efforts to stop revenge porn before it spreads
• Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold for $$$$ to private equity firm, price caps axed
• Five Years Later, Who Really Hacked Sony?

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• Billie Eilish: Same Interview, The Third Year
• Typologies of New York City: A Crowdsourced Hyperlapse
• Martin Scorsese Is a Genre: 10 of His Best Shots

Things to look at/read:

• How the 2010s Changed Physics Forever
• The dangerously cheesy collectible Cheetos market
• The Final Days Of Japan’s Most Incredible Arcade

Animal corner:

• A Very Big Dog Named Floyd Had To Be Rescued On A Hike And The Photos Are Amazing
• I guess we will just never solve the mystery of who stole the cookie…

Tweets of the week:

• Watching THE IRISHMAN exactly as Martin Scorsese intended
• How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria (1959)
• You gotta watch this video PLEASE
• i found the most perfect video on earth and i’m here to share it with you all
• This is how battle rappers look when they’re getting flamed

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• Style Is an Algorithm
• Voices of the New Masculinity
• The Collapse of Civilization May Have Already Begun

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We Love the Internet 2019/47: The Why everything is getting louder edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• How Twitter Changed Music
• Rising signs
• How the push notification came to rival the Six O’Clock News
• Fast Made Them Furious: Netflix Playback Speed Worries Creatives
• The Gartner Hype Cycle is … hype. Don’t use it as an excuse.

Reference points:

• New wave of visual experiments challenges conventional TV wisdom
• 10 For The ’10s

Longer reads:

• Why Everything Is Getting Louder
• Is Amazon unstoppable?
• Spotify’s Daniel Ek Has a Plan to Harness Hollywood for Podcasts and Create “the World’s No. 1 Audio Platform”
• I Lived Adam Neumann’s Perfect Life for a Day. It Was Terrible.

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• DJ Earworm – Decade of Pop: 100 Song Mashup
• The Scared Child Inside Every Leader
• How to give a fake Skype interview
• World’s Craziest Meal – Alchemist
• Man Laughs Uncontrollably At His Friend For Walking Into Glass Panel, Receives Some Swift Karma

Things to look at/read:

• The reflections in a pop star’s eyes told a selfie stalker exactly how to find her
• “OK boomer” isn’t just about the past. It’s about our apocalyptic future.
• Life Without A Living Room: 3 Women Let Us Inside Their Homes
• Frankenswine’s Monster: Can the McRib Survive in the Viral Food Culture It Created?

Animal corner:

• Golden Retriever puppy play with mirror reflection
• Lazy cat sleeps on busy restaurant floor refusing to move.

Tweets of the week:

• I just wanna snort whatever crack these bollywood directors do before they come up with shit like this LMAOOOO. this is both the worst and best action scene ive ever seen in my life
• This rugby interview is one of the best sports interviews I’ve seen, as it keeps getting delightfully weirder as it goes on.
• We got a new video baby monitor and I think that was a mistake
• coachella ‘98 had to be the most memorable festival of all time
• Women are so emotional.
• The three genders.
• my biggest take away from seeing everyone’s decade photos comparisons.
• I learned more about personal essays from this one TikTok than from any class

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• Flour power: meet the bread heads baking a better loaf
• What Really Happens When You Become an Overnight Millionaire?
• Five dimes
• The Rise of Conceptronica
• The Beating Heart
• Jimmy Hoffa, my stepfather and me

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We Love the Internet 2019/46: The Google squeeze edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• How Spotify’s Algorithm Knows Exactly What You Want to Listen To
• Facebook Watch and the Emotion-Harvesting Future of Television
• Experience: my face became a meme
• A Game Like Heroin: On Escapism, TwitchCon, and Kicking the ‘Fortnite’ Habit

Reference points:

• So the internet didn’t turn out the way we wanted
• The size of space
• Deprivation map

Longer reads:

• The Google Squeeze
• Can Apple Become the Google of Television?
• A Philosopher’s Definitive (And Slightly Maddening) Case Against Replay Review
• Hollywood’s Video Game Blind Spot

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• The Tunnel of Death
• How many US cities can you name?

Things to look at/read:

• Mister Global 2019 National Costumes
• Can you microwave?
• JD Salinger’s Spider-Man
• Topping from the Bottom

Animal corner:

• Dog born with tail growing out of his head
• Blind dog adorably starts prancing after realizing he’s on snow
• I have watched this approximately 9,345,678 times so far today

Tweets of the week:

• The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
• we put more work into making this tik tok than uni
• “Your tweet has reached 100 likes. Please wait, an out of context weirdo will be assigned to you shortly.”
• Oh, thank god. I loved her in Broadchurch.
• This is cruel
• whoever made this deserves a medal of honor
• My son just OK Boomer’d me.
• He’s seen some sh*t…

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• This Tom Hanks Story Will Help You Feel Less Bad
• The Mysterious Death Of The Hacker Who Turned In Chelsea Manning
• How Red Bull Pissed Off a Generation of Athletes
• Is The Weed Business About To Look Like the Coffee Business?
• Malfunctioning Sex Robot

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We Love the Internet 2019/45: The Millennials kill everything edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• The YouTube Revolution in Knowledge Transfer
• AI Is Coming for Your Favorite Menial Tasks
• The case for spoilers
• NBC is leaning toward making its Peacock streaming service free to everyone
• People Are Poking Holes in Influencer Tactics – What Comes Next?
• Entertainment is getting even shorter and even longer. What about the ‘purgatory’ in the middle
• The cold, sterile art of Instagram brotography
• Why the Facebook News tab shouldn’t be trusted

Reference points:

• Millennials kill everything
• Flag stories
• Writing Docs at Amazon
• Martin Scorsese’s Film School: The 85 Films You Need To See To Know Anything About Film
• The TV MVPs of the 2010s
• Millions of Books Are Secretly in the Public Domain. You Can Download Them Free
• ‘Made in Japan’ tech is back and crazier than ever

Longer reads:

• Britain’s Most Polarizing Journalist
• Jack Conte, Patreon, and the Plight of the Creative Class
• The Slow-Burning Success of Disney’s Bob Iger
• Four years in start-ups
• What was the Golden Age of TV?
• The Absurdities of ‘Franchise Fatigue’ & ‘Sequelitis’ (Or, What Is Happening to the Box Office?!)
• Has Advertising Lost Its Personality?
• Why can’t we agree on what’s true any more?

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• CCTV footage: St. Louis Bar Regular Lights Up Cigarette While Bar is Being Robbed
• The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet
• (not-so) Easy Breakfast Sandwich – take two
• Why this creepy melody is in so many movies
• NO ENTRY sign – I’ll risk it
• Matt Tomasello in “Rodney Mullen on Bath Salts: Round Three”
• Bad driving -learn how to drive #21

Things to look at/read:

• Enterprising Florida Woman Makes $100,000 a Year Off of Tongue Pics
• Keanu Reeves is dating a woman close to his own age. Why is that so shocking?
• The Rise of ‘Hangry’: A Modern Word for a Timeless Feeling
• My Secret Life as a Mysterious Multimillionaire’s Personal Assistant
• What’s it like to own the most-visited Airbnb in the world

Animal corner:

• Owner Forbids Dog To Jump Into Swimming Pool, Dog Immediately Does Just That
• One doggy obstacle course, two different paths
• Octopus Dreaming
• This Dog Trying To Mimic A Breakdancer Is Delightful
• My homie said you’re cute lol he kinda shy tho, that’s him over there
• This song can easily make it to the top 10

Tweets of the week:

• LMAOOOO im crying
• Don’t care about the John Lewis Christmas ad only wanna see how Robert Dyas follows up on this banger
• Despite all his rage, he is now just a guy in a cage.
• he whomsoever that canst draw the motorola from this carriageway shall be kinge of all post brexit englandde
• How disgusting
• This is sending me
• Open for a surprise

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• The war on sex work
• I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb
• The Surreal End of an American College
• One Summer in America
• Stories About My Brother
• The “Cancel Culture” Con
• A brutal murder, a wearable witness, and an unlikely suspect
• Dark Man X: The Resurrection

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We Love the Internet 2019/44: The Mavening of sportswriting edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• The Mavening of Sportswriting
• On Chandler Bing’s Job
• Are Memes Ruining Television?
• ‘The West Wing’ vs. ‘Freaks and Geeks’: TV at a Crossroad in 1999

Reference points:

• When Will Netflix Finally End Its Cash Burn?
• The 50 most beautiful places in the world
• The Comedians You Should and Will Know in 2019

Longer reads:

• Superfans: A Love Story
• Who Would Tavi Gevinson Be Without Instagram?
• The Four Horsemen of the Restaurant Apocalypse?
• How Fan Culture Is Swallowing Democracy
• Studio Chief Summit: All 7 Top Film Executives, One Room, Nothing Off-Limits
• The Mainstream Media Is Not Playing Games
• How Turkish TV is taking over the world

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• “Marvel” Homecoming Assembly Dance
• Old Crime Meets New Crime
• Twin Peaks ACTUALLY EXPLAINED (No, Really)
• Skinny home in Toronto as prototype for parking-space homes?
• Souped-Up Truck Tries And Fails To Climb A Small Incline — Much To The Delight Of The Guy Filming
• I COOKED a Brisket for a MONTH and this happened!
• Why’d They Kill Tyrone? Unpacking Blackness in Horror Films
• Guy Tries To Overcome His Fear Of Heights By Skydiving, Faints Three Times

Things to look at/read:

• The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving
• Why Are Rich People So Mean?
• Every Year Adults In Japan Dress Up In Incredibly Relatable Costumes For The Jimi Halloween Event
• Space: a major legal void
• Downloading Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare Was An Absolute Nightmare
• Someone left old TVs outside 50 homes in Virginia while wearing a TV on his head. No one knows why.
• A new Swedish bicycle is made from 300 recycled Nespresso pods

Animal corner:

• Maru & Hana pass it
• This song can easily make it to the top 10
• Best thing you’ll see today
• parrot encounters an illegal rave, brazil
• When your favourite song comes on in the club
• Dear Professor Bloggs

Tweets of the week:

• My sister is a fool 😂 she killed this though
• If anyone wants to know how my weekend went I totaled my car while dressed up as Carrie and everyone who was a first responder thought I was dead HAHAHAHA IM SO SORRY
• if you’re feeling stressed, just remember to IN EX HAHA LE LE
• Callum Paterson’s face says it all
• October 26 is now Dave Benson Phillips Day

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• Behind the Scenes in Putin’s Court: The Private Habits of a Latter-Day Dictator
• A Paranoid Tech Bro, a Homemade Nuclear Bunker, and a Shocking Death
• The Distinctly American Ethos of the Grifter

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We Love the Internet 2019/43: The Dropshipping journalism edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• “They’re doing this badly on purpose”: Why the Tories’ latest online ads look so ugly
• What happens if your mind lives for ever on the internet?
• Screen breaks: how TV music supervisors boost new artists
• A series of mysterious bleeps and bloops defined the early days of the internet
• What publishers like BuzzFeed, Hearst and Vice are learning from being on TikTok
• Air Force finally retires 8-inch floppies from missile launch control system

Reference points:

• Netflix’s Top 10 Original Movies and TV Shows, According to Netflix
• ‘Do you wind it up?’: today’s teens tackle rotary phones, FM radio and map reading
• He pretended to be a black woman online and became famous – then his life unraveled

Longer reads:

• Dropshipping journalism
• The connections between Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, and the National Enquirer, explained
• The Creators Of Pokémon Go Mapped The World. Now They’re Mapping You
• The not-so-secret life of a TikTok-famous teen

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• Ghostbusters – Ray Parker Jr. 2019 Halloween Light Show
• Succession: Say What You Mean
• You’re Not Allowed to Die Here
• What if We Nuke a City?
• The Men of TOP BOY and the Pressures of Masculinity
• The postman
• Opening a Locked Door With Movie Film
• Super Mario Bros. (Tap Dance Medley)

Things to look at/read:

• Can you stomach this epic thread of horror cinema’s most vile gore sequences?
• For toymaker Hasbro, trade wars are no fun
• Dallas Mavericks’ Mark Cuban dismisses owning US esports teams as “awful business”
• The Distinctly American Ethos of the Grifter
• The most innovative architecture and urban design of 2019

Animal corner:

• Jump Around Dog in Box
• Pelican Waiting in Line for Fish & Chips
• What a useless cat
• let’s open this motherfucking pit
• At Pollock FC in Scotland a big football fan – a dog called ‘Yardley’ – is allowed to watch games from the stands at Newlandsfield Park.
• Cant stop watching this
• I wish I loved anything as much as this dog loves walks.
• Every day for nearly 13 years this dog has finished her dinner and instantly brought me a toy to say thank you. I can’t believe how much I adore her.

Tweets of the week:

• You don’t need sound to figure it’s happening in a UK pub
• A jar of beetroot has leaked in our fridge and it looks like a Kubrick movie
• It’s been 15 years and the lifeless CGI  eyes in The Polar Express still freak me out
• trumps going to promise to build a wall in every state and then only do a couple just like sufjan stevens
• I’m shitposting about six hours early today but this is the best meme I’ve seen all week
• The French Olympic logo tumbles out of bed on a Parisian morning
• Gmail when you sign in on another device
• This made me laugh not gonna lie

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• Against Nihilism
• Inside the most brutal dictatorship you’ve never heard of
• Is One of the World’s Biggest Lawsuits Built on a Sham?
• ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’
• What I Wish I’d Known About Sexual Assault in the Military
• Competitive Oyster Shucking Is Real, Decadent, And China’s Best Party

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We Love the Internet 2019/41: The 12 defining shots of Breaking Bad edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Goodbye to the 2010s, a decade of upcycled culture
• What Happened to Urban Dictionary?
• Fortnite has reached The End – changing video game storytelling for good
• Almost Everything About Goodreads Is Broken
• Apple: The First Hope-Based Company
• Mouse whisperers: meet the Disney influencers making a living at the Magic Kingdom

Reference points:

• Let’s sort through the good, the missing, and the really, really weird of these Disney+ titles
• What’s Your Hour in ‘Silicon Valley Time’?

Longer reads:

• What Not to Expect
• Streaming video: We hardly knew ye
• Data wars
• Was Etsy too good to be true?

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• Inside the bizarre world of internet trolls and propagandists
• This Video Of A Rocket Sled Going 6,599 MPH Is Bonkers
• i was fascinated with how much of tiktok is underpinned by black culture thematically so i scrolled and recorded everything i saw for 20mins and condensed it

Things to look at/read:

• How to pack a Norwegian sandwich, the world’s most boring lunch
• Graffiti Artist Creates Amazing Street Art Illusions Using Only Spray Paint
• Let’s talk about sex, baby: How pop music is changing the way we discuss sexuality

Animal corner:

• idk what this rabbit is going through but same bro
• Cat Realizes She Has Ears!

Tweets of the week:

• I just can’t not hear a drunk 21-year-old girl at her sorority formal when I read this
• I just lost my wallet on the way home from work
• Angela Merkel with the face of Steve Bruce.
• as you can see from this beautifully constructed graph, I have distilled the enduring appeal of 1999’s The Mummy down to its core essence

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• The Heir
• ‘I Really Thought He Was Going to Kill Me and Bury My Body’
• Free Solo climber Alex Honnold’s next summit? The rest of his life
• The Legend of Baltimore Jack

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