We Love the Internet 2020/13: The These lyrics do not exist edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• What Happens Now for the TV Industry?
• Fashion influencers are rethinking their curated aesthetics because they can’t leave their houses
• Why High-Achieving Women Pretend Their Lives Are a Mess
• TikTok Is Filled With Pro-Eating Disorder Content, Despite Its Own Rules
• Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
• The Coronavirus Is A Media Extinction Event
• Here’s What People Thought of YouTube When It First Launched in the Mid-2000s
• Quartz sees video as a subscriptions driver

Reference points:

• These Lyrics Do Not Exist
• SXSW 2020 shorts
• In 40 tweets I will describe 40 powerful concepts for understanding the world.
• How is The World?
• Eight marvellous and melancholy things I’ve learned about creativity
• TikTok Challenges, Ranked by How Likely They Are to Maim or Kill You
• How to watch movies with friends online
• An interactive visualization of the exponential spread of COVID-19

Longer reads:

• Cultural insights from the US conversation on Twitter
• The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Unilad
• Things to know in CTV, today
• As Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Quibi Races Toward Launch, Will a Changed World Help or Hurt?
• Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet
• Garbage Language
• Behind the Scenes at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Chaos at Condé Nast

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• The power of vulnerability
• How a Tranquilizer Dart Works in Slow Motion
• Inglourious Basterds – “Camera Angel” Clapper
• British daytime TV in under 10 minutes

Things to look at/read:

• Google Suggests “Husband” After Women’s Names More Often Than “Wife” For Men
• Odd Job: What’s it like to be a real-life Disney princess?
• Someone Found A Photo Album With A Woman Next To Hollywood Stars In A Thrift Shop And It’s Like A Time Machine
• A Fascinating Diagram Breaking Down The 100 Most-Spoken Languages In The World
• What’s the deal with airplane food?
• One Woman and Thousands of Lego Bricks Are Building a Town Much-Needed Wheelchair Ramps

Animal corner:

• Okay friends in isolation/quarantine, I am here for you with a THREAD of animal live cams:
• My Malamute hates bathtime
• ‘Lobo’ the Siberian Husky goes off script in the 24 inch class of agility competition
• I was bored
• Just in case you need it, here’s a dog doing yoga in Italian. You’re welcome.
• can’t stop thinking about this couple who had to make a fake lap for their clingy cat so they could get work done

Tweets of the week:

• someone in our neighbourhood has responded to this global pandemic by putting a cutout of Ainsley Harriott in their window
• Behind every successful woman is an unsuccessful man not wearing any pants:
• A nice example of how we infer object position from what we presume to be a cast shadow
• Chose your fighter: Blue check sacrifice edition
• Me going for a walk past the neighbours after they’ve used theirs up:
• You sure this isn’t staged? Nobody else around, no security staff, and whoever is filming is managing to get all the angles
• Omg Bryn Celyn Care Home in south Wales does self isolation human hungry hippos
• 👍🏾🙂

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• 8ight Things I learned in Solitary Confinement, That Will Help You Keep Calm During the Coronavirus Pandemic
• The nuclear family was a mistake
• I stumbled across a huge Airbnb scam that’s taking over London
• Yuval Noah Harari’s history of everyone, ever
• Question time: my life as a quiz obsessive
• “Everyone Knows a Leon”: The Freestyle Brilliance of J.B. Smoove, the Secret Weapon of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’
• How the Pandemic Will End
• How ultra-processed food took over your shopping basket

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We Love the Internet 2020/12: The 25 songs that matter now edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• How to Run a Business in 2020
• Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Self-Isolating Future
• “I’m Not An Epidemiologist But…”: The Rise Of The Coronavirus Influencers
• You Have a Moral Responsibility to Post Your Boring Life on Instagram
• The Economics of 24/7 Lo-Fi Hip-Hop YouTube Livestreams
• With cookies on the way out, advertisers turn to old-school measurement methods
• How Dubsmash revived itself as #2 to TikTok
• Addressable TV: the pros and cons of ads made just for you

Reference points:

• 25 songs that matter now
• Basic Consultant Diagrams
• Why outbreaks like Coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to “flatten the curve”
• Digital trends 2020: Every single stat you need to know about the internet
• 1,000 True Fans? Try 100
• Brand communications in time of crisis
• A retrospective on the history of work
• Price changes in textbooks versus recreational books over the past 15 years

Longer reads:

• Facebook Advertising Decoded in 15 Minutes
• Adventures in Publishing Outside the Gates
• Leaked Documents Expose the Secretive Market for Your Web Browsing Data
• How Cameo Turned D-List Celebs Into a Monetization Machine
• Invisible censorship
• Big Swinging Brains and fashy trolls: how the world fell into a clickbait death spiral

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• Board game arena
• You can now make sick beats in Microsoft Excel
• Fire in the hole
• Family fixes home in ghost-town lab & tells others to follow
• Cooking with Paris
• Helicóptero da polícia é atingido por caminhão ao tentar decolar
• A cutting three-card magic trick
• A Russian prankster glued a massive portrait of President Vladimir Putin to the inside of a residential elevator.

Things to look at/read:

• 5 Theories About Conspiracy Theories
• Virtual Karaoke Should Be Your Next Coronavirus Pastime
• Facebook Won’t Remove This Woman’s Butthole As A Business Page
• A Collection of 40 Bad Christian Album Covers With Unfortunate Titles
• Why Millennials Refuse to Let Go of Physical Media
• The Most Loved and Hated Classic Novels According to Goodreads Users

Animal corner:

• A Dog And A Bear Cub Have A Jolly Good Time Wrestling With Each Other
• Hilariously Overdramatic Husky Complains That His Water Bowl Is Empty
• Great Dane Is Devastated When His Owner Tells Him He Can’t Go Swimming
• Mad Malamute After Bath Won’t Look At Me!
• I’ve invented a game of “cat cricket”.
• Notice how even monkeys only take what’s needed?
• Better than The Irishman,

Tweets of the week:

• Staying home in Spain
• NYC rules. That is all.
• the hanks family are a compelling case study for nominative determinism.
• Social Distancing…
• Quarantine day 6.
• Experts recommend keeping your daily rituals even while working from home.
• Zoom pro tip 3: make it a video background to have a convincing loop of you looking engaged
• Working from home be like:

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• The Money Behind Trump’s Money
• The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President
• Stormzy: ‘In my diction, in my stance, in my attitude… this is Black British’
• How Google Got Its Employees to Eat Their Vegetables
• Why Are Cops Around the World Using This Outlandish Mind-Reading Tool?
• The $100 Billion Man: How Bernard Arnault Stitched Together The World’s Third Biggest Fortune With Louis Vuitton, Dior And 77 Other Brands—And Why He’s Not Done Yet
• The sting
• Tesla’s billionaire CEO fought a lawsuit over his own bad behavior and won.

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We Love the Internet 2020/11: The Japanese meal for cats edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• What is a Weird Internet Career?
• Down the Rabbit Hole of Twitch Streamers’ TikToks
• Hollywood’s New Dilemma: When Is a Movie Worthy of Movie Theaters?
• Finding belonging: imposter syndrome, adland, and culture
• From Loyalty to Membership
• Why Did Bob Iger’s Disney Announcement Feel So Rushed?
• Locked Out: How the Coronavirus Could Change American Sportswriting Forever

Reference points:

• Coronavirus tech handbook
• The world’s 50 most innovative companies of 2020
• This Meme Does Not Exist
• Let’s talk about the emotional range of celebs in GIFs.
• Inside Quibi’s advertising strategy

Longer reads:

• Saving the Internet—and all the commons it makes possible
• The Most Important Media Businesses of the (Past and) Future
• Zero Trust Information

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• Exponential growth and epidemics
• Seinfeld Horror Game Update
• Psychology Tricks to mess with someones mind
• get out of my swamp
• The uncensored library
• How a Legendary Chef Runs One of the World’s Most Iconic Restaurants

Things to look at/read:

• This Retired Cabinet Maker Goes Viral For Making Broken And Weird Furniture That Belongs In Disney Movies
• Tips for the Depressed
• I Was A Middle-Class Drug Mule

Animal corner:

• Japanese meal for cats
• Saving a stranded Orca in B.C.
• Never Turn Your Back on BIG CATS
• my cat got surgery and she kept tearing off her surgical cone so we got her a cone from amazon that’s a piece of bread
• What are they talking about?

Tweets of the week:

• this graphic design is telling me to congratulate them
• Just got an email from a prof: “As a reminder, you are required to wear clothes during Zoom meetings.”
• when historians write about the last hour they will begin by noting the 2008 republican vp nominee was rapping on tv dressed as a bear, then the network cut to trump announcing coronavirus flight suspensions, then tom hanks got it & the nba suspended
• someday everyone will be able to immediately pick out all the millennial gravestones
• i’ve watched this roughly 76 times just for the german guy
• powerful
• Boomers: the Coronavirus is important, because it kills people over 60, let’s close the borders
• please tell me about an extremely niche section of twitter that you never knew existed until you made them angry.

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• Between the spreadsheets
• “Who Can’t Get on Board With That?”: How ‘House Party’ Brought the Black Teenage Experience to the Mainstream
• Dressing for the surveillance age

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We Love the Internet 2020/10: The Is it cancelled yet edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Tikked off: What happens when TikTok fame fades
• Why Scripted TV Shows Are Becoming Scarce on Basic Cable
• How hard will the robots make us work?
• This Brand is Late Capitalism
• Will the millennial aesthetic ever end?

Reference points:

• Is it canceled yet?
• Do not touch your face
• What is the coolest website you’ve visited that no one knows about?
• 100 women of the year
• VCs Congratulating Themselves
• Improvements since the 1990s

Longer reads:

• Gotta Go Fast: Why Gaming IP Is Finally Taking Off in Film/TV
• Inside the Athletic: the start-up that changed journalism forever

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• The importance of choosing who to grow old with.
• Copyrighting all the melodies to avoid accidental infringement
• How many European cities can you name?
• Clueless White Guy Orders in Perfect Chinese, Shocks Patrons and Staff
• The universe’s biggest gear reduction!

Things to look at/read:

• The abuse and threats made to Greta Thunberg by people from Bristol
• Someone is using cat stickers to cover racism in Manchester
• Cycling through all the streets in Central London
• Underwater Photographer of the Year 2020 results gallery
• Poverty isn’t a lack of character. It’s a lack of cash

Animal corner:

• Epic Service Dog Training Failure
• Remembering Fidel: The Celebrity Labrador of Bruges
• One of our kittens is a bit of a drama queen
• Special-needs puppy and pigeon who can’t fly form unlikely friendship
• Duck Spotted Wearing Shoes
• Nanny Dog Protects Baby from Evil Vacuum Cleaner
• Pennsylvania man captures all walks of life crossing log bridge

Tweets of the week:

• Oh my god it looks just like Laura Dern
• so my mum bought a lamb for £20 so it doesn’t get killed tomorrow and is planning to keep her in the garden with the dogs???? Honestly wish I could say I’m surprised but it’s very her
• mr rogers no
• The caption of this photo probably triggered one of the biggest edit wars in Wikipedia’s history.
• This man live in a community college
• I have to believe there’s a better way to structure these headlines
• What’s it like living with anxiety:
• this french guy filled his tub with orbeez then had no idea how to get rid of them so he just pulled the plug which resulted in orbeez overflowing both in his toilet and sink

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• Shell Is Looking Forward
• There’s an Entire Industry Dedicated to Making Foods Crispy, and It Is WILD
• The invisible city: how a homeless man built a life underground

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We Love the Internet 2020/09: The Meta trending trends edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Cats, Once YouTube Stars, Are Now an ‘Emerging Audience’
• Netflix Seeks Cancellation of “Choose Your Own Adventure” Trademark in ‘Bandersnatch’ Dispute
• YouTube briefly shut down internet chill-out mainstay “lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to”

Reference points:

• The Meta Trending Trends: 2020
• City roads
• Smithsonian Releases 2.8 Million High-Res Images Into the Public Domain
• The 50 Greatest Breakup Songs of All Time

Longer reads:

• The Flaws of “Subscription Fatigue”, “SVOD Fatigue”, and the “Streaming Wars”
• Inside the Seething Boardroom Drama That Poisoned HQ Trivia
• My Instagram

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• Who Is the Loneliest Person to Ever Exist?
• Incredible trick to fix a zip which is blowing people’s minds
• Why is this every property show ever
• my brother heard my parents having sex and had a complete break down while telling me about it

Things to look at/read:

• We Asked 10 Bartenders: How Do You Make a Good Mocktail?
• ‘I brainwashed myself with the internet’

Animal corner:

• A javelina was caught speeding near 22nd and Kolb in Tucson.
• Kitty Gives Adorable Boop
• These Service Dogs Attended A Relaxed Performance Of ‘Billy Elliot’ To Learn How To Behave In A Theater
• For the love of god UNMUTE THIS
• i just started crying at this am@i ok

Tweets of the week:

• The best headline has arrived at last
• LMFAOOOOO
• Spotted outside a fish restaurant in Buenos Aires. I fear the commercialisation of brand Sussex is worse than we feared.
• I mean
• This is so beautifully intricate I almost want it to be true.
• i’m at the ███████ i’m at the taco bell i’m at the combination ███████ and taco bell
• I went on a date with every presidential candidate so you don’t have to.
• My sister on holiday with the kids, they had a few cute ‘towel animals’ left on the bed during the week but just came back to this

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus
• Inside the world of ‘femcels’
• Inside the building of Bernie’s  grassroots celebrity army
• ‘Why haven’t you shut down the border?’: inside Trump’s White House
• American Psycho: An Oral History, 20 Years After Its Divisive Debut
• The Mysterious Lawyer X
• The Bizarre Bank Robbery That Shook an Arctic Town
• The prison inside prison

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We Love the Internet 2020/08: The Fog of Rudy edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Resilience Is the Design Imperative of the 21st Century
• NBC Streamed Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist Everywhere for a Month to Reach Young Viewers
• Brandless was actually a brand – just a bad one
• Silicon Valley Abandons the Culture That Made It the Envy of the World
• Caught in the Spotlight
• Why We Need MTV Now More Than Ever

Reference points:

• Tech in 2020: Standing on the shoulders of giants
• Movie marketing of the oscars
• Words That Don’t Translate
• List of fictional institutions
• How to stop Netflix autoplay
• The 100 Most Popular Free Online Courses of 2019

Longer reads:

• Why do corporations speak the way they do?
• The debate over subtitles, explained
• Smorgasbords Don’t Have Bottoms
• #CES2020: Primordial Soup of Innovation
• YouTube at 15: what happened to some of the platform’s biggest early stars?
• The Next Frontier in Storytelling Universes and the Never Ending Desire for More

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• Contouring 101
• Baby Benson thinks mamas sneezes are hilarious
• My mathematical analysis of So Solid Crew’s 21 Seconds.
• Conspiracy theory: a studio exec hired someone to do this deep fake to see if the internet wants this remake
• The most rock and roll thing you will ever see

Things to look at/read:

• Your worst office romance was never this bad
• Their dark materials
• A dentist was filmed extracting a tooth while on a hoverboard. He was found guilty on 46 counts
• The pungent legacy of Axe Body Spray
• This Dad Taught His 10-Year-Old Son How To Use Photoshop By Adding Lifeboats To Famous Paintings
• So long, salt and vinegar: how crisp flavours went from simple to sensational

Animal corner:

• The Moment A Cat Realizes He’s Living With Two Big Dog Idiots
• A cat thinks long before hitting a dog
• Capybara bathtime
• Cat Is Very Determined To Drag Its Lazy Friend On A Walk
• Impressive Display of Stock Dog Obedience
• mi nuevo video favorito
• Why does this cat look like he’s being shown the tweets that got him fired
• when she dropped the ball
• OWLS CAN SIT CRISS CROSS APPLESAUCE

Tweets of the week:

• A bloke eating a full English on the London Underground.
• bono, petite
• Sick flip bruh
• I always imagine he had stood on a piece of Lego halfway through this sentence.
• What a day
• My friends are pieces of shit
• Note Bong Joon Ho does not wear a mask, because as the director of both PARASITE and THE HOST viruses respect & fear him
• When you go to a gallery and discover you’ve not aged in 430 years…

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• The Fog Of Rudy
• Diplo Is Workin’ 5 to 9
• The Baron of Botox Is Gone, But His Face Lives On
• The Mysterious Lawyer X
• Outrageous Fortune: Nats, August, and Gigi Gorgeous Getty Are Not Your Typical Old-Money Scions
• Is Cannabis the Answer to Everything?

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We Love the Internet 2020/07: The 2020 trends reports edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• What the Death of iTunes Says About Our Digital Habits
• Twitch’s Non-Gamers Are Finally Having Their Moment
• How TV comedy’s funniest characters got their names
• Why Creativity Is a Numbers Game
• Does Facebook Need an ‘Understand’ Button?
• How social media has changed in the past decade, according to its influencers
• From context collapse to content collapse
• Creators finally know how much money YouTube makes, and they want more of it

Reference points:

• 2020 trends reports
• Amazon dating
• The evil list
• Introducing 78 new emotions
• The 100 Greatest Emo Songs of All Time
• FiveThirtyEight – Our Data
• The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2019
• Premier League Average Weekly Wages £

Longer reads:

• Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Lost Notebook
• BuzzFeed In 2020
• The rise of the personal brand: how selling out became cool in the 2010s
• Kudos, leaderboards, QOMs: how fitness app Strava became a religion
• The Man Who’s Spending $1 Billion to Own Every Pop Song

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• I don’t deserve friends as good as mine
• How to Pronounce Frappuccino
• StormCiara LIVE From London Heathrow
• Super Humman stunt video compilation
• Little Girl Tastes Lemon Juice And Thinks She Likes It — Until She Realizes Her Mistake
• Hollywood’s Most Infamous Director: Who the Hell Is Alan Smithee?

Things to look at/read:

• Coronavirus causing major shortage of NHL sticks
• This Man Has Become The First Person With HIV To Fly A Commercial Plane
• People Are Finding Images Of Their Deceased Loved Ones On Google Maps

Animal corner:

• Zookeeper’s Talk Descends Into Chaos When A Pissed Off Koala Comes After Him
• Kitty Scares Off Coyote Pack
• I could be wrong but I think the squirrel sliding down a greasy pole video is even funnier when reversed and set to Westlife

Tweets of the week:

• This review is the creepiest horror story I have ever read.
• Bong Joon-ho did 100% what any of us would do if we won more than one Oscar: he made them make out
• Strong “chose his own nickname” vibes
• this is canon
• The way this silo collapses
• It’s really remarkable how this single photo explains all of American Politics in 2020
• Pokémon go die in a tornado
• Bins free, as free as the wind blows…

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• Weightlifting put sport on steroids – now ex-users can play their part in the clean-up
• Everything You Don’t Know About Chocolate
• Bring up the bodies: the retired couple who find drowning victims
• The Midlife Crisis of the American Restaurant Review
• The Art of Racing Pigeons

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