Category Archives: Fun

Nick Kroll's Social Media Manners

Posted on by David Pierce | 2 Comments

Nick Kroll, from Best TV Show Ever “The League,” gives Details readers advice on how to not be terrible at social media. Lots of good stuff, but two things he’s dead on about:

If you write LOL in a tweet or status update unironically, I will immediately assume that I am smarter than you are.

And:

Don’t bother going on first dates anymore. Skip right to the second or third date. Why? Because if I have your full name, I will Google you, Facebook you, check you out on Tumblr, read your tweets, and see what your favorite YouTube videos are. The only thing you can learn about people on a first date is how good they are at pretending like they don’t already know everything about you.

 

How Twitter Beat the Stock Market

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Rebecca Greenfield, at the Atlantic Wire, reports on a hedge fund that took all its advice from Twitter, and beat the stock market:

Not all words or moods reflect the markets ebbs and flows. The algorithm specifically looks at the level of calmness on Twitter explains Jordan. “Their results showed that rises and falls in the number of instances of words related to a calm mood could be used to predict the same moves in the Dow’s closing price between two and six days later, with a fall in these “calm” words being followed by a fall in the index. The other moods did not have the same predictive quality, the paper said.” Specifically, it looks for words like “alert,” “happy,” and “vital,” adds Financial News Michelle Price. “Derwent Capital scans a selected 10% of available tweets at random and will then categorise these messages into one of a range of mood states.”

God: The First Blogger

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It’s a shame there was no blogging software when God was doing his thing, because the world of Internet commenters would have certainly had much to say on the subject. The New Yorker’s Paul Simms imagines a few of them :

Unfocussed. Seems like a mishmash at best. You’ve got creatures that can speak but aren’t smart (parrots). Then, You’ve got creatures that are smart but can’t speak (dolphins, dogs, houseflies). Then, You’ve got man, who is smart and can speak but who can’t fly, breathe underwater, or unhinge his jaws to swallow large prey in one gulp. If it’s supposed to be chaos, then mission accomplished. But it seems more like laziness and bad planning.

There’s imitation, and then there’s homage, and then there’s straight-up idea theft, which is what Your thing appears to be. Anyone who wants to check out the original should go to www.VishnuAndBrahma.com. (And check it out soon, because I think they’re about to go behind a paywall.)

I think God would’ve had a Tumblr, personally. god.tumblr.com is currently being grossly underutilized.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

The Ups and Downs of iPad Video Gaming

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Tom Bissell, at Grantland, immerses himself in the wide and wonderful world of iPad games. His insights as a “true” gamer are fascinating, and in two consecutive paragraphs he does a wonderful job of hitting on both the good and the bad of the platform:

Busting through a windshield by tapping your iPad screen is cool, and way more kinesthetically appealing than the blunt-instrument-waving interface system of something like the Wii. Somewhat less cool is getting around the world of Chinatown Wars by using the floaty virtual joystick found in the bottom left-hand corner of the iPad screen. GTA games have always been about moving around and getting in trouble. This is the only GTA game in which moving around guarantees you will get in trouble, because it is impossible to travel 16 feet without killing four pedestrians and plowing into the nearest police car. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that the iPad is not exactly the premiere platform for driving games. That said, Chinatown Wars is absolutely worth playing, if only for its drug-dealing minigame, in which you tool around town meeting junkies and finger-dragging bricks of coke from your briefcase to their duffle bag, and from which I took slightly more pleasure than felt morally comfortable.

Chinatown Wars brought me into first contact with what I am going to call iPad gamings Movement Problem, whereby precision navigation within a given gamespace is complicated by the necessarily imprecise nature of tracing your finger along a touchscreen, which is not helped by the inevitable accumulation of sebaceous oils upon its onyx surface. Mass Effect Galaxy, a spin-off from BioWares acclaimed third-person shooter/sci-fi RPG hybrid Mass Effect, tries valiantly to come to terms with the Movement Problem. Moving the games player-controlled character — Jacob from Mass Effect 2 — is achieved by tipping the iPad one way or another, thereby allowing the simulated momentum to “carry” Jacob across the screen. Keep in mind that while you are doing this you are also trying to shoot and clobber enemies. It is all about as ungainly as it sounds.

When Only Facebook Knows Your Birthday

Posted on by David Pierce | 1 Comment

David Plotz, editor of Slate, grew to hate all the “It’s So-and-so’s birthday!” messages he got on Facebook, so he decided to mess with the system. In the course of three weeks, Plotz told Facebook it was his birthday three different times. Hilarity ensued:

My second fake birthday, two weeks later, was when things started to get strange. I received 105 birthday wishes on July 25, nearly as many as two weeks earlier. This time, nine people suspected something was awry. James P., for example, jibed: “It must be pretty nice having multiple birthdays each year, let alone in the same month!” But the skeptics were faroutnumbered by profligate birthday wishers. Of the 105 birthday wishes, 45 of them—nearly half—came from people who had wished me a Facebook happy birthday two weeks earlier. The highlight of my second fake birthday? Playbook, Politico‘s famous Washington tip sheet, included me in its daily birthday greetings, prompting a whole raft of non-Facebook birthday wishes from D.C. insider friends.

This makes me nervous. I only know the birthdays of about six people at this point, and it would be easy for them to figure out in rapid fashion that I, along with most other people, have no idea when their birthday actually is. Might be time to start writing this down.

Shakespeare Would Have Loved Tumblr

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Colson Whitehead, today’s installment of My Favorite Writer on the Planet In The World Ever (mostly because of this piece), writing about why he’s not so worried about the 21st century distractions we bemoan:

There are those who moan, oh, Shakespeare wouldn’t have written all those wonderful plays for us to “modern update” if he’d had Angry Birds and Darklady.com. Is it so terrible, here in the 21st century? A sonnet is perfect Tumblr-length, and given the persistent debates over the authorship of his work, the bard would have benefited from modern, cutting-edge identity theft protection. The old masters didn’t even have freaking penicillin. I think Nietzsche would have endured non-BCC’d e-mail dispatches in exchange for pills to de-spongify his syphilitic brain, and we can all agree Virginia Woolf could’ve used a scrip for serotonin reuptake inhibitors. I digress. The Internet is not to blame for your unfinished novel: you are. People write novels in prison, for chrissakes.

How NOTW Hacked Those Voicemails

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Gizmodo: the place for guides to doing shady things, you know, hypothetically. Rachel Swaby figures out how the News of the World hacked into so many people’s voicemails and got Rupert Mudoch in a pie-load of trouble:

To access these messages, cell providers typically offer an external number you can call to get into your mailbox. The service recognizes the phone number calling, which is convenient for everyone—including people trying to get into your voicemail. Phone numbers—that unique identity that we assume belongs only to the object in our pocket—can be spoofed using Voice Over IP and some open source software. “The caller ID is a burst of data before the signal that tells the phone to ring,” explains Chester Wisniewski, a Senior Security Advisor at Sophos. “If you’re not using a commercial service provider, you can set your caller ID to anything.” This means that that external number that you call to check your voicemail may interpret the falsified number as yours and act accordingly.

Ad Blindness

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If you’ve been on the Internet for longer than, like, a half hour, you’ve figured out how to avoid looking at or even noticing the existence of banner ads. But just how tuned out are we? Business Insider found out that, among other things, you’re more likely to get into Harvard (87.8 times more likely, to be exact) than you are to click on a banner ad.

With that, I’m going to go click 10 banner ads. And then I’m going to get into Harvard, but I won’t go because my plane will crash after I summit Everest. Let’s do this.

How to Meet Girls Online

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Mostly, GQ’s advice is about how to meet girls online and not be a sketchy creep who’s probably going to jail. But it’s good advice:

First? If you really want to approach somebody via Internet, try to have met them in person first. Some middle-aged people I was recently partying with because I am very cool told me how scary that first ask was in their times. You had to actually place a call to somebody who had ostensibly seen you in three dimensions (at a malt shoppe, I guess?). The terror of this was compounded by the fact that a parent or sister or roommate could answer. The phones were rotary, and the older sisters were suspicious. Now, what’s to keep you from liking a hot stranger’s months-old photo at 3am? (Aside from dignity and advanced privacy controls.)

You Can't Flirt About a Kindle

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Lisa Lewis used books to get guys, and now she’s out of luck:

I had one good pickup line, and e-readers ruined it. I can no longer hit on a handsome man on a long commute by asking about his book — because I can’t see it. Gone are the days when, sitting on a train delayed in the station, I could imagine exactly where in the New York Public Library we would first kiss — in the stacks between Mailer and Malamud or Foer and Franzen? E-books may be saving literature, but my dating life has suffered.

We all know you can’t tell a book by its Nook, but for for me, a geeky 29-year-old N.Y.U. graduate, this problem is particularly acute. A man’s literary taste can score as many points as being good with my parents or an ace in the kitchen. I promise there is nothing flattering about me awkwardly straining my un-swanlike neck toward a cute guy’s Kindle to guess what he’s eyeing. Instead, I am limited to those who peruse The New Yorker in print. And I fear those days are numbered.