Make like I'm not talkin' to ya

There are 121 posts tagged: teh soshull notwerk

Arrogant pollie vs 'arrogant billionaire'

23 April 2024

I have in the past expressed my antipathy for Elon Musk as a filthy-rich twat who makes ugly electric vehicles and interferes in the politics of nation states. But I've warmed to him in his new role as defender of free speech and pricker of hubris. And none so much as him going in to bat against Australia's government and eSafety Commissioner over their nanny state censorship.

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The trials of trivial celebrities

7 April 2024

I don't know whether it's age or the splintering of entertainment by streaming—most of which is inaccessible unless you have deep pockets and little enough of a real life to justify subscribing to more than one provider—but there seems to be so many vacuous stories of celebrity nonentities. Has it always been like this, and the rise of social media has only now brought it to my attention?

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This may be the first time

25 March 2024

It appears that putting it out there for all to see may not always be received positively by the great unwashed. Social media creators report online trolling and hate, which can negatively impact their mental health.

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TikTok BOOM!

13 March 2024

The US proposes to ban TikTok, because it represents a security risk and turns users into zombies, unless the Chinese owner ByteDance sells the platform…presumably to an American company. I can see how its sale might reduce the security threat, if there is such a thing. Its users will remain zombies though.

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Gmail: false hope

24 February 2024

Some naughty individual(s) spread a hoax on X that Gmail was to be shuttered in August. Google rushed to publicly confirm that, unfortunately for those of us deluged with Gmail spam, this was not the case and its users can continue to spew shit into our inboxes.

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Marichika Spring

5 February 2024

Reports in the Indian media on the death of an actress, which was falsified for clicks and publicity to [cough] elevate awareness about cervical cancer, show that Indian urinalists are as gullible as their British counterparts.

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Mirror Mirror?

26 January 2024

A BBC World Service report on the alleged historical sale of babies in Georgia, and familial reunion through social media, is headed by this photo of identical twins, separated at birth.

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Too much misery

22 January 2024

True crime is a popular subject for YouTube channels, one of which being The Misery Machine. It's not the best—I find the alternating shared presentation format irritating—but it crops up, and it is what it is. Today, they cover the horrific long-term abuse and eventual murder of a thirteen-year-old boy, in 2017, at the hands of family members.

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Pigs to the cancel

13 December 2023

SJW have been trying to cancel people on social media, particularly Twitter, for years. But the acronym is a conflagration of three favourable attributes: social; justice; and warrior, which together give it an air of positivity. Any of them engaging in digital lynch mobs would consider themselves as being on the right side of history. In reality though, they're self-serving, black-hearted cowards; and SJW is not a fitting term.

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Cobalt revolt

2 December 2023

Children on TikTok are quitting vaping in support of the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Sorry, that's a lot of of thes right there, but ne'ermind.

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Dang it, Bobby

1 December 2023

In an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times' DealBook Summit, Elon Musk laid into advertisers who were boycotting X over comments on Israel in the wake of the Israeli invasion of Gaza. He selected Disney and its CEO, Bob Iger, for special attention:

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Two-tier X

22 October 2023

Elon Musk's X will launch two subscription tiers: one with ads, and a more expensive one without them.

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Marianna unsprung

2 October 2023

I've mocked the often self-serving grift of the BBC's social media and disinformation correspondent, Marianna Spring, on several occasions. But Spiked's Tom Slater takes a deeper dive, and does a more thorough job of calling out her hubris in Marianna Spring: the BBC’s misinformation merchant.

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Living like a monk...but not

2 October 2023

It seems that children are not alone in spending too much time on social media, grown-arsed adults also have difficulty prioritising and unplugging. According to one shameless sad sack, it's hard to limit your social media use by willpower alone. Hence there are apps—hohoho—for anyone who can't just switch their phone off and leave it in another room.

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X the known

20 September 2023

A BBC News report on the hacking of Donald Trump Jr's X account, with its ensuing joviality, gave hope that Auntie Beeb had moved on from the rebranding; X was mentioned twice in the absence of its former identity. Alas, it was not to be, and X, formerly Twitter finally made its appearance at the third instance, two-thirds of the way in.

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When will "X, formerly known as Twitter" become X?

5 September 2023

Back at the end of July, Elon Musk announced that Twitter would henceforth be known as X. Presumably it marks the spot in general terms, rather than on a treasure map, because it was too early to celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day—which is 19^th September, if you're curious.

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Music mix

14 August 2023

I imagine it's fair to say that anyone who watches YouTube content has a penchant for certain subjects and content creators. I guess the algorithm learns that and brings in new but more of the same over time. Perhaps the settings are stored on one's computer, dunno. Whatever, it seems that the algorithm really shits the bed on occasion, and loses track of my favoured viewing; possibly in an attempt to drive me towards creating an account.

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F*c*book is harmless. Honest!

9 August 2023

A study conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute suggests that using Facebook is not linked to widespread psychological harm. Oh yes, indeed. And you know you can trust the findings, because they said so. (no)

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All the news that's fit to ignore

14 June 2023

According to research by Oxford University's Reuters Institute, strong interest in the news has declined globally over the last six years. The report's authors suggest that this is because readers selectively avoid important stories, to reduce their exposure to depressing news and protect their mental health.

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300lb of Whatever

11 June 2023

Ali C. Lopez (@al.weeezy) is a grossly obese trangender TikToker. I'm really uncertain as to whether she's a comedy legend or suffers from epic delusion, for when she appeared on the Whatever podcast, the self-proclaimed certified bad bitch rated herself a full fat fucking ten. This is on a 1–10 scale. Did she misunderstand the question? (confused)

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Emojional unintelligence (clown)

2 June 2023

A coalition of Germany’s regional broadcasters has released a list of extreme right wing emojis, use of which on social media can be used to identify you as a fascist pig. These include a student raising their hand, as a nazi salute; an okay symbol alongside a glass of milk, for white supremacy; a clown face, as comment on non-extreme right-wing politics; and a red cross, in place of a swastika. I shit you not: (cross) = (swastika)…(whatever)

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Chinese takeaway

18 May 2023

Those of us who avoid the vapidity of TikTok will have been blissfully unaware of a ding-dong among its mouth-breathers over British Chinese food. Of all things. Fortunately, Anna Sulan Masing is here to fix that oversight and enlighten us.

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Blurring the lines

5 May 2023

I guess one problem that the BBC has, in having so many categories for articles and reporting staff, is pigeonholing and assigning specific stories that might plausibly fit within more than one category. For example, should an article on a journalist being tracked by TikTok be categorised under technology—because technology is used to track her—or social media—because TikTok is teh soshull meejah, innit?

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Inordinate interest in trivia

23 April 2023

I guess there are only so many things to occupy the waking hours of a disinformation and social media correspondent, which is presumably why the BBC's Marianna Spring is reduced to counting celebrity losses and gains in the Twitter verification stakes. This is of such high import, that she's co-opted another lackey to help.

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Government-funded anti-government media

10 April 2023

A couple of days ago, Twitter designated NPR as state-affiliated media, although it has since backtracked slightly, amending its label to government funded media. At the time, I wondered how long it would take for the BBC to be assigned a new label.

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0s and 1s

30 March 2023

I don't know why this qualifies for BBC Worklife per se, other than zoomers have to work like the rest of us, I guess; but Jessica Klein seeks to educate us as to How young people are shaking off gender binaries. The relevance of zoomers to work life, I can understand; their gender binarism is another matter entirely. Unless these attitudes are having an impact on the provision of toilet facilities in the workplace. (confused)

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Abnormal students

27 March 2023

A BBC story of cyber bullying on Chinese social media is most notable for bringing the existence of East China Normal University to my attention. I wonder what courses are taught at East China Abnormal University? (thinking)

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No shits for Springtime (poop)

21 March 2023

You can't keep a good journalist hack urinalist down, and once again Marianna Spring has sprung into mithering over trolls on Twitter. Oh, and pimping her gossamer-thin investigation, instigated by personal butthurt and treated derisively by the space cadet:

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Springtime for Hateler

6 March 2023

Marianna Spring is the BBC's disinformation and social media correspondent. Her role is to seek out problems on teh soshull meejah and whinge about them. This time, it's about hurt fee-fees on Twitter, particularly hers. First World problems, huh? (snowflake)

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Shazam?

23 February 2023

I tried to watch Shazam! some time ago. It was pretty gay: an origins story trying too hard to be too comedic for a B-list DC superhero whom I'd never heard of, and I gave up. Now, the sequel, Shazam! Fury Of The Gods is pending release. I am not pumped. And it appears that I may not be alone.

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Angry Birds

19 February 2023

I'd forgotten about Angry Birds. Yeah, I used to play the game, back in the day. Who didn't? But I haven't touched it for years. Who has?

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Mic drop

7 February 2023

Nothing, Forever is an AI-generated webtoon based on Seinfeld and its principal characters. Streaming continuously on Twitch, it's apparently more of an exercise in the use of the technology than a source of genuine entertainment. At least, the clips that I've seen weren't amusing; a case of art imitating life, perhaps? (shrug)

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Prancing prophet

8 January 2023

Since being fan-edited into Jenna Ortega's dance improv in s1e4 of Netflix's Addams Family spin-off, Wednesday, Lady Gaga's Bloody Mary has become a bit of a trope on social media. I guess I never paid much attention to it before now. But now I have…and the lyrics are enlightening, to say the least.

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Très bonne année indeed

8 January 2023

As unsolicited email goes, it's not offensive and it's not begging for money. Nevertheless, it is unsolicited, and offers me the option to unsubscribe from a newsletter that I never subscribed to in the first place. In fact, this is the first that I've ever heard of either Pierre-Yves Lorand or his company. Such is the joy of LinkedIn.

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More than you didn't pay for

2 January 2023

The thumbnail promises to reveal Everything Wrong With Death on the Nile in 22 Minutes or Less.

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A fool and their money

12 December 2022

Scott Shafer has a YouTube channel on which he uncovers internet-based scams. Today, it's the turn of Vanessa Sierra, an OnlyFans creator and metaverse land flipper—of all things—who conned investors in an NFT scam called Smol Boyz Land.

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A tale of two rocket men

10 December 2022

Sir Elton John has rage-quit flap-quit Twitter, over changes in misinformation policy under Elon Musk's ownership:

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Retard talking retards

4 December 2022

Tucker Carlson is a Fox News anchor. Or talking head. Or something like that.

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All the news that's fit to 3D print
(Scisynopsis Conferences)

29 November 2022

For reasons too dull to relate, I've been thinking about 3D printing. Watching tutorials, reading reviews of printers, that sort of thing. Not actually doing anything practical though, or spending anything but my time. Baby steps.

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Bellended

17 November 2022

Glorious happenstance has led me to learn that Alex Bellend Belfield—a man with a face for radio, a voice for print, and a personality for waste disposal—was recently imprisoned for five-and-a-half years for online stalking. I hope he finds a nice shower buddy. (prick)

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Military cocktail

13 November 2022

Following his takeover of Twitter, the space cadet announced paid-for account verification. The blue check brigade lost its collective shit—it's a thing that losers on Twitter are wont to do. But it didn't take others too long to seize the opportunity for some major-league trolling.

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Low-energy bubbles

9 November 2022

I've mentioned YouTube channel TheQuartering before. It's one of the lowest-energy commentary channels on the platform, if not within the entire universe; including as yet undiscovered civilisations out there [points at stars].

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Let the good times and heads roll

28 October 2022

The deal is done. Elon Musk is now Chief Twit at Twitter, and he's started by immediately axing the company's top executives, including the Chief Censorship Officer.

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The future is fucked. We're all doomed!

22 October 2022

Grace Keeling, AKA gkbarry, is—according to the BBC Newsbeat droid—One of the UK's top TikTok creators, who's known for her candid, funny, short videos. Well, okay then.

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Delusions of relevance

14 October 2022

Madonna, at the tender age of 64, appears to have come out. Again. In a TikTok video, she alludes to the possibility that she bats for the other side. As if anyone cared anymore.

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Titania: emphasis on the 'tit'

7 October 2022

Jameela Jamil (who?) is an actress, of sorts—providing you're wantonly liberal with the definition of the term—who plays the role of Titania in Marvel's She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. I've not seen the show, since it's exclusive to Disney+, but from what I've seen of it in trailers and critiques, I'm glad I'm not wasting money on a Disney+ subscription.

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Wobbly

21 September 2022

Of all the cultural commentary channels to be thrown up at me on YouTube, JosiahRises is probably the most pointless. The man has such a zealous hate-boner for Hollywoke elites that it amounts to obsession; there's nary humour or critical objectivity. It must be the distortion caused by his Christian-conservative lens. But I'm sure he's a riot at parties.

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A foregone conclusion

14 September 2022

Twitter's shareholders have voted to approve the purchase of the company by Elon Musk for $44bn. Musk is trying to extricate himself from the deal, claiming that he was misled over the number of fake accounts on the platform. The shareholders' vote will allow the company to take legal action to force him to buy it. Talk about a shotgun marriage.

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Leap of no faith

9 September 2022

I'd never heard of Bed Bath & Beyond, a US domestic retail chain, until criminal lawyer Bruce Rivers posted his reaction to the company's CFO's suicide by autodefenestration. Gustavo Arnal, who faced investigation for financial irregularities, fell from his 18^th-floor Manhattan apartment last Friday.

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Disrespecting the departed

24 August 2022

Kurt Cobain railed against the mundanity of, among other things, the corporate music scene. The label classic rock—insinuating brain-in-neutral listening—would, I imagine, have been an anathema to him.

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Alarming

24 August 2022

Should you ever need a nine-hour timer, then Online Alarm Kur has got you covered with their 9 Hour Timer. You lucky you, you! (thumbup)

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Wrong message

18 August 2022

A common written style of street vocabulary eschews the use of vowels, relying instead on phonetics to fill the gaps. Thus, N becomes ‑in‑ or ‑en‑, etc. It's so commonplace that reading acronyms phonetically becomes second nature.

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Half dutch

16 August 2022

This cropped up as a most read lead on BBC News online. What at first appeared to be a compelling national statement on social media abstinence, however, turns out to be a very much more mundane tale of a minor celebrity stepping away from InstaTweet. What a let-down! (thumbdown)

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Gone! And never called me mother!

10 August 2022

New privacy features have been announced for WhatsApp, including the ability to leave group chats silently.

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Goo-goo(gly) eyes

5 August 2022

Googly eyes on YouTube video thumbnails: it's a trope that's overused on pop culture and social commentary hot-takes; often accompanied by copius tears and exclamation marks. And this isn't just my opinion, it's one that was recently shared by none other than Richard Meyer, who's cropped up here before. And that reminded me of something…

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The world's most trusted social media

21 July 2022

In a discovery that should surprise absolutely nobody, the UK's teenagers rely on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube for news, rather than traditional media outlets. This startling revelation comes in a report from the UK's communications regulator, Ofcom.

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Grandchildren endangered

20 June 2022

Following the murder of 13-year-old Olly Stephens in January last year, Marianna Spring examines the influence of social media on his death. From her investigations for the BBC's Panorama programme, it appears that F*c*book, Instagram, and Youtube did not moderate the display of inappropriate content to an underaged child's account, while TikTok and Snapchat did.

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Richard the Third

14 June 2022

There's been a lot of commentary following the outcome of the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation trial. One of the highlights of the case, which has been the source of much hilarity and derision, was the revelation—although I'm pretty sure that it was publicly known years ago—of Heard taking a dump in the marital bed, and later trying to pass the blame onto one of the couple's lapdogs. She now lives in infamy as Amber Turd.

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Zits and tits

10 June 2022

YouTube has added a new category of videos to its home page, called Shorts. These are not only short, but vertically-framed, which makes me think that they were originally created for TikTok. The intellectual standard certainly supports this assumption.

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So Pride

1 June 2022

The mothers—or birthing people, if you're a T ally—who gave us life and nurtured us to adulthood have had their day. Veterans, and those who lost their lives for our freedom, will get theirs in due course. Now's the time for pandering to the five-percenters.

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Unreaction

30 May 2022

Reaction videos are the lamest and laziest form of YouTube content. This is not just a statement of opinion, but one of actual factual FACT! (oldman)

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Tweet in space

26 April 2022

After a period of broad speculation, Elon Musk will buy Twitter for a cool $44bn. The announcement has some of the Twitterati weeping into their soy lattes, if not actually soiling themselves.

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I chain, I sawed, I conquered

7 April 2022

I've a long-held passion for chainsaws. Oh yes, indeed. And I'm obviously not alone. This video, from Triple L Rustic Designs, has received 12 million views in a month! Yet they only have 276K subscribers. Wow! Who'd've figured? (shock)

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Stormy weather

6 April 2022

If ten hours of fireplace crackling is too hot for you, you might appreciate twenty-four hours of non-stop heavy rain action. And who wouldn't?

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Fire safety

21 March 2022

The ten-hour video shown in this thumbnail is actually ten hours and 31 seconds long. Presumably, the extra half a minute is for the paid sponsorship. (thinking)

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Of gods and dwarves

2 March 2022

So, there's a great deal of bitchin', back-and-forth on social media, over Amazon's reimagining of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings fantasy world. It's kinda funny, watching grown men and women, but mainly [cough] men, get so animated about the arcane details in stories of elves and dwarves. Hey-ho, if it floats their boats, at least it's harmless.

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Skating on thin ice

8 February 2022

Wahey! Weibo's nationalistic shitheads are at it again. The it being brutally castigating their Olympians' performances, when failing to excel at things that they—the nationalistic shitheads, that is—wouldn't have a hope in hell of achieving in the first place. In particular, figure skater Zhu Yi, who fell a lot, leaving Team China out of the medals.

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Check your privilege

31 January 2022

Another example of Richard Meyer's voice-acting skills. This time, an opinionated Twitter weirdo making demands from people who, hopefully, don't give a shit about her expectations.

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Peachy

21 January 2022

Counting down his choice of The Top Ten Worst Hit Songs of 2021, Todd in the Shadows muses on the banality of Justin Bieber's Peaches, ft. Daniel Caesar and Giveon.

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Standing in the shadows

16 January 2022

Todd in the Shadows is a popular music critic. A critic of popular music, that is; although his YouTube channel is approaching half a million subscribers, so I guess he's popular…ish. His chart retrospectives are based on the Billboard Hot 100 year-end lists, but most of the entries are familiar even to me, having grown up in England.

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Bombing under the radar

10 January 2022

The 355 has bombed at the US box office. The usual suspects claim that it's because this all women-led spy caper is part of an unimaginative progressive movement that audiences are tiring of. There may be something to that argument, but are they merely trying to fit things to their own cultural narrative?

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Film noir (et blanc)

4 January 2022

The First of the Few, AKA Spitfire, is a 1942 propaganda docudrama starring Leslie Howard and David Niven, recounting R.J. Mitchell's development of the Supermarine Spitfire. It's a little too jolly hockey sticks and derring-do to not be cringeworthy today.

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Too close to the sun

2 January 2022

I'm not sure whether to file this under comedic genius, or intellectual tragedy.

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Sally Ann Howes: no longer banging

22 December 2021

On the death of Sally Ann Howes, star of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, her son, an artist named Andrew Hart Adler, announced her loss on his Instagram account.

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RT: all is not what it seems

17 December 2021

There seems to be some confusion, at least among commentators on social media, as to what the Rotten Tomatoes audience score means. Take, for instance, YellowFlash discussing the 99% score for Spider-Man: No Way Home.

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Gagging order

17 December 2021

Russia's authorities like to throw their weight around. One of the ways that they do this, on the internet, is by demanding the removal of social media content that they deem to be illegal. Their definition of illegal, though, extends to content that is simply critical of them, or supportive of the opposition. Who could've possibly guessed? (thinking)

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Ageing disgracefully

6 December 2021

At 63, Madonna is keen to show the world that she still has it. Whatever it is, and whether or not the world wants to know.

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Too soon to hope

2 December 2021

Jack Dorsey, CEO and co-founder of Twitter, is stepping down. Or should that be stepping up, since he's leaving the gutter?

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Social media (bath) bombing

23 November 2021

Lush, producer of overpriced and overhyped cosmetics and personal care products, has announced that it will deactivate some of its social media accounts, until platforms take steps to provide a safer environment for users. The platforms of concern are Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. (fist) (geddit?)

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Privacy is very important to F*c*book

19 November 2021

F*c*book has admonished the LAPD for breaching its T&C, by establishing fake profiles to surveil users suspected of criminal activity.

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All-we-can-afford-for-you-to-eat

18 November 2021

An all-you-can-eat buffet in Changsha, China, has banned a food live-streamer for…eating all he can eat. The owner of the Handadi Seafood BBQ Buffet stated that Mr Kang was losing him money every time he visited.

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Fighter talk

11 November 2021

YouTube channel Military TV posted a completely pointless and contentious list, of The 10 Deadliest Planes of WWII. They confuse things somewhat, by adding WW 2 Fighter Planes to the end of the video's title, but we'll come back to that later.

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Hello hardly anyone

4 October 2021

F*c*book and its subsidiaries, WhatsApp and Instagram, have been hit by a severe, global outage. In response, Twitter tweeted, in fun:

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Persona grating

29 September 2021

Just another of those sticking it here for my amusement posts.

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Herbidacious

20 September 2021

I wonder if she's the same simona.su@3sgroupcn.com who's a sales representative for 3S Group. Both 3sgroupcn.com and 3sgruopcn.com are registered domains, but only the former has a website, and it purports to sell water pumps. (thinking)

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Dial 'M' for monotonous

26 August 2021

YouTube's random algorithm has thrown up the promotional video for M's Pop Music at me, several times in the last couple of weeks. I really didn't like that song back in 1979, and the forty-odd intervening years have done nothing to improve my opinion of it.

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Comics for dummies

24 August 2021

Richard Meyer is an independent comic book writer, or artist, or both. Something like that. He has a YouTube channel in which he talks about comics. I don't know why YouTube throws this shit up at me, but it does.

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To chirp, or not to Chirp

17 August 2021

A recent interface redesign has left Twitter users complaining of headaches and discomfort. The illegibility of a newly-designed typeface, Chirp, hasn't helped those with impaired vision.

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Iron Giant is bestester

6 August 2021

Internet dweebs have mocked the BBC, after a tweet by BBC Sport from the Tokyo Olympics confused a Gundam statue with a Transformer.

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Sore losers

3 August 2021

It appears that Weibo's nationalist shitheads don't take kindly to China's Olympic athletes unpatriotically losing out on gold. From behind their keyboards and keypads, they fulminate and humiliate their fellow countrymen and ‑women for failing at something that they could never achieve themselves. And the athletes, like dumfux, accept it.

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Mushrooms are tasty

28 July 2021

Ina Garten (who?) is the Barefoot Contessa (who?). At least, I think she is.

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Can I have a 'please, no more emojis' emoji?

25 July 2021

It appears that the BBC considers the creation of emojis to be of such importance that they assigned not one, but two of their crack business reporters to the task of writing an article on emojis that don't exist. Yet.

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Virtual schmoozing

23 July 2021

Mark Zuckerberg has announced his vision for Facebook to transition to a metaverse company.

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Man at the top

12 July 2021

Interviewed by Amol Rajan on behalf of the BBC, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent company, Alphabet, claims that the free and open internet is under attack.

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Is there a dietician in the house?

16 June 2021

A couple of idiots on YouTube, claiming to be dietician nutritionists, and spreading misinformation. Who knew? I couldn't watch the whole video, because their voices grated on my nerves.

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Is there a doctor in the house?

10 June 2021

Ooooh, I've found another crackpot on YouTube. Aren't I lucky?

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My mum's newspaper, as an audiobook

27 May 2021

YouTube's algorithm is broken. Again. Or possibly it's because I can't set preferences, since I'm not signed into an account that I don't have. Whatever, the borg keeps bringing up The Podcast Of The Lotus Eaters and, worse, Alex Bellend Belfield, the self-styled voices in his head voice of reason in my recommended videos. For the love of the children, why?

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Don't shoot the messenger

22 April 2021

Forty-eight hours have passed, and 2021 Free Expression Awards Highlight: Susan Wojcicki has been up for about a week. In that time, it's received 76,179 views; five times the number of subscribers to the Freedom Forum's channel. And far, far more than any of the other 2021 Free Expression Awards' videos.

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Buy freedom

20 April 2021

The Freedom Forum is a nonpartisan 501 (c)(3) foundation that fosters First Amendment freedoms for all [Americans, presumably].

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Ghostbusted

8 April 2021

That irrepressible bonehead, Jeremy Hambly at TheQuartering, unfavourably compares the upcoming Ghostbusters: Afterlife with the original Ghostbusters (1984). He notes that the ghosts aren't scary, unlike those in the original, which he describes as a horror film:

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Debunking disliking dislikes

6 April 2021

In No More Dislikes For You, Just Some Guy raises more valid points on YouTube's experiment. This is a useful insight to those of us who are not YouTube content creators.

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Disliking dislikes

1 April 2021

For undisclosed reasons—read: pressure from Disney/LucasFilm—YouTube is experimenting with hiding dislike counts.

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Justice is served!

17 March 2021

Zac Snyder's version of Justice League is finally upon us, with most critics agreeing that it's an improvement on the 2017 original, at least according to those reviews cited by the BBC. The original was infamously fucked up, sorry, reimagined by Joss Whedon, when he took over the production after Snyder's departure following a family tragedy. I have watched that version, described by one anonymous Warner Bros executive as a piece of shit. It was…okay, but let down by a muddled plot and an anticlimactic antagonist.

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Let (s)he who is without sin

5 March 2021

The lexicon of oxymorons—rhetorical self-contradictions such as bittersweet, deafening silence, and military intelligence—has been added to in recent years with the advent of cancel culture. I really cannot think of anything remotely cultural about cancelling someone or something.

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Breaking the rules

2 March 2021

As I mentioned long ago, it's thanks to my perfectly-fitted tinfoil hat that I'm not part of the social network. I don't do F*c*book; Twitter; Instagram, or any of that other stuff. At one point, I did have a hardly-used, one careful owner YouTube account, but I bailed out when Google did a Monica Lewinsky, and came a'gobblin'.

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'I' for information, not intelligent

9 February 2021

As more of our lives go online, companies and governments are turning to automated methods to keep things in check—face recognition, profiling, personal data acquisition; all very Orwellian. I don't know what's more worrying, the consequences of it working, or the consequences when it doesn't work as expected or intended.

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Twitter killer

1 October 2020

When my eye first noted a BBC headline declaring Twitter killer, I thought it was about a new rival to the messaging app for the brain dead. But this is an altogether more macabre story.

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Taking a fall

8 August 2020

I'd not heard of Jerry Falwell Jr, the president of Liberty University, a US evangelical Christian college, until he stepped down from his position following an unfortunate social media faux pas in which he posted a photo of him with his arm around a pregnant woman who wasn't his wife. For shame!

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What a fool believes

2 August 2020

Elon Musk, a man who believes in life out there [points at the stars], may have embarrassed himself on Twitter by musing on the extraterrestrial origin of the pyramids. Egypt's minister of international co-operation, Rania al-Mashat, and Egyptian archeologist Zahi Hawass have refuted his statement—but they would, wouldn't they?—although I thought that al-Mashat's response was unnecessarily deferential to the space cadet.

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Bustameme

25 July 2020

Memes. You either understand them, or you don't. And, for a time, for those that didn't, there was Behind The Meme, a YouTube channel demystifying memes for the uninitiated. The channel's still there, it just hasn't been updated in a long while.

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(q) When is an SJW not an SJW?

25 July 2020

(a) When they're virtual signalling.

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Closing the gender gap

16 July 2020

Another day, another hashtag movement. And this one concerns US police brutality. Just for a change.

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Yanking chains

17 June 2020

I seem to have fallen into a pit of irrelevance on YouTube.

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Influencers

11 May 2020

Social media influencers. Some people love 'em; others think that they're pointless, vacuous droids that do nothing creative and add nothing of value. I know on which side of the divide I stand.

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Lies, damned lies, and the other one

29 August 2013

An article on Adrants, pithily entitled This is How Facebook is Going to Die, claims that Facebook's demise will result as teenagers flock to other social networks to avoid their parents. In support of his hypothesis, Steve Hall states:

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Savile row

16 November 2012

During investigations into child abuse at Welsh children's homes, one victim implicated a high-ranking Conservative Party official in a recent Newsnight broadcast. Apparently the individual wasn't named during the programme, but later Twitter chatter wrongly named former party treasurer Lord McAlpine.

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Twitter: is this the end of the road?

2 August 2012

The BBC reports that Helen Skelton has closed her Twitter account, because she cannot cope with negative comments. How many will follow her and abandon the sinking ship?

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Wot you lookin' at?

27 January 2012

Those sons of fun at the USAsian FBI plan to develop—or, rather, have developed for them—a handy-dandy tool that will sniff its way through social networks and suck up all the terrorist plots. Certain keywords that are only used by bad people plotting naughtiness can be added. These will trigger the hairs on the backs of their necks, and bring their righteous wrath down on the sorry arses of Osama and his like-minded friends.

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Odd spam

9 June 2011

I received quite a strange spam invite entitled Exclusive Invite For New Social Nertwork for professionals.

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Facebook

1 March 2009

I received an invite from someone who I'd briefly exchanged emails with about two years ago, asking me to be their friend on Facebook. And all I'd have to do is join first.

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What the *%$# happened to my *%$#?

11 November 2008

You know the old saying, call a spade a spade? Well, sometimes you can't, because some people out there on the internet really shouldn't be out there on the internet; people who're easily and righteously offended—either for themselves, or on behalf of others—when their fragility detectors cause the hairs on their necks to stand on end. The dinky butthurts who, rather than turning the other cheek; (wo)manning up; and moving on, will have a pissy fit instead.

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