Category: Internets

2014 seemed to go by in a flash. It was a strange year for me, but one constant remained: I spent a lot of time on the Internet. Here’s some of my favourite discoveries.

Funniest video: “Mr Needlemouse”

5 minutes of comedy sketch perfection. “Fuck limpets!” Up there with the very best, yet criminally underviewed.

Honourable mention: Faramir Can’t Read Maps. Technically it was published at the end of 2013, but it gets a mention here because I crack up every time I’ve watched it and it’s so expertly done. It also means there’s yet another scene in Lord of the Rings that I can no longer take seriously.

Best music video featuring Star Trek TNG and sausages: SAUSAGE SAMBA

not a hotly contested category to be honest

Funniest piece of writing: The Wikipedia Entry for Guam, Retold as a YA Novel

Pushing confusing thoughts of United Airlines’ broad back muscles and status as a subsidiary of Chicago-based Continental Holdings aside, Inarajan looked up and realized they had arrived at their destination: The forbidding edifice that was the Duty Free Shoppers Galleria. She suppressed a shiver. Her very first non-binding Presidential straw poll. Surely she would not survive.

Bizarre and accurate and amazing and hilarious.

Best subreddit: /r/AskHistorians

Still endlessly fascinating, and responsible for reigniting my interest in history. A close contender was /r/DeepIntoYouTube, which is also endlessly fascinating but in entirely different ways.

Best artist: Chris (Simpsons artist)

How could it be anyone else?

Best Twitter bot: how 2 sext

WikiHow’s odd articles have often been a source of amusement. Even more so when how 2 sext tweets random snippets from it formatted as sexts.

Most horrifying Twitter: @BadSonicFanArt

The Internet can be a horrifying place. @BadSonicFanArt is a constant reminder of that. As the name suggests, it just tweets and retweets examples of the worst Sonic fan art. There’s genuine works and parody all mixed up in there, and some sort of fan art Poe’s law makes it difficult to tell which is which.

Best blog: Diamond Geezer

Yes, he writes a few long posts about bus journeys. Sometimes even I skip those for lack of time.

But skipping the occasional post hardly matters since you can be certain there will be another one along like clockwork the next day, and it’s very likely to be informative, amusing, or both. That’s why it’s generally the first site I check every day. I’m pretty sure the blog has never skipped a day, and he’s been posting for 12 years! A remarkable record.

Since I’ve moved to London, this blog has taught me a huge amount about the city and my local area. And I’m sure it will continue to do so in 2015 and beyond.

Oh wow, so I haven’t blogged here in a long time. But this annoyed me and was too lengthy for twitter, so here we go…

Saw an intriguing tweet from Google’s corporate account earlier:

Project Glass: building tech to help you explore your world & put you back in the moment. We’d love your feedback: g.co/projectglass

No context about what it actually was (sigh 1), but sounded interesting and I guessed it would be some kind of augmented reality thing based on recent news stories so clicked through on my phone. Was taken through to a Google+ profile page (sigh 2), which read:

We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.

We started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.

Follow along as we share some of our ideas and stories. We’d love to hear yours, too.

Which again, told me basically nothing about the project (sigh 3). Clicked on the “Posts” link to see if that had more useful information. “Please sign in to Google+”. (Sigh 4)

Signed into Google+. Immediately taken back not to the Google Glass page, but to my home feed (sigh 5) populated by the few people I know who are still actually using Google+. There was however a helpful banner at the top of the page telling me I could download the Google+ app for Android. Which I already have (sigh 6), and which it should have opened in to start with to save the signing-in hassle.

So jumped back to Twitter, and clicked the link once again to get back where I was. Clicked on “Posts” and lo-and-behold, was able to read a single post:

We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.

A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do.

Please follow along as we share some of our ideas and stories. We’d love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?

Again, basically information free. (Sigh 7). Still clicked on the video, since Google are apparently no longer capable of explaining things with text, only with cutesy videos. And boy was this cutesy and hipstery. (Sigh 8).

But anyway, my point is: this is definitely something I’m interested in. I wanted to learn more about it. So why were so many roadblocks in my way? They even say it themselves: “technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t”, which is basically the exact opposite of my experience.

I do love Google, many of their tools are incredibly useful and they are still kings of search. But in my opinion they would be far better off fixing annoyances and doing a better job of explaining/marketing their existing products than constantly churning out new things. With an experience like this, there’s no way I’d want them in my eyes all day long.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been spending more and more time at reddit.com. It’s a site I’d known about for a long time, but only through occasional links via it. I never had it in my favourites or made a habit of checking. Now I’ve delved a little deeper, and found it’s a remarkably nice community (well, actually a collection of separate communities, which is part of the attraction).

Things I really like:

• The huge choice of sub-reddits, and how you can subscribe/unsubscribe to them for the front page
• A remarkable self-policing community
• A clean, simple interface
• I switched off AdBlock Plus for reddit today, as I’d heard their ads were fairly unobtrusive and I want to support them. First thing I see? “Reddit would like to use this ad space to say: Thanks for not using AdBlock!” with a thumbs up from their cute alien logo. Clever both technically and psychologically, it raised a smile (and prompted me to write this post) :)

I think I may have found the finest example of a Youtube comment thread. On the video for ever controversial comic Frankie Boyle’s Most Offensive Jokes (of course, a hilarious video in itself) the following exchange takes place:

MrHeadingley (-9)
Please somebody write something on here which pertains to English. I am skimming Frankie’s videos and am yet to find an intelligent statement from anyone, or from Frankie himself. Frankie Boyle is full of comments for other people: straightforward insults that were funny for about 7 people back in 1976. He laughs at his own jokes and looks painfully nervous; he tries to dominate everything and repeats almost every joke night after night in his stand up. Val Doonican was more entertaining.

truemansparks (+1)
Dear Mr headingley the impression i get from your comments makes me think that you are nothing more than a vile turd chewing pile of putrid lizard excrement with the mental capacity of a slow worm on pot,so shut the fuck up you disgusting necrophiliac baboon felcher!p.s how dare you drag Val Doonnican into this his live shows were fucking blistering !!

MrHeadingley (0)
truemansparks,
Only one ‘n’ in the middle of Doonican

It helps that the middle comment was the first I saw, which made the sudden leap from foul-mouthed invective to a passionate defence of Val Doonican all the more entertaining. And MrHeadingley’s comeback is exquisite.