This week on Sound of the City: Chris Molanphy attempts to define the parameters for using the often-misused term “one-hit wonder.” It is awesome and you should read it. 

buzzfeed rebrands mouse-over Javascript as “rubbable GIFs”

katherinestasaph:

Maybe I am just a total pedantic fucking geek clinging to outdated, inaccessible technological jargon of geeky ingroups, and I guess it’s well established that I am anti-fun or whatever… but on the other hand, RUBBABLE. GIFS. That aren’t even GIFS. 

Let’s rebrand everything!

Clicking = poking

Double-clicking = Facebook poking, you know, the kind of poking when you like-like someone

Dragging and dropping: Giving your icons a piggyback ride

Scrolling = Psyche! Scrolling will still consist of trying to carefully pry the invisible disappearing scrollbar away from your desktop and the ads on the side of the screen, like a game of Operation! 

I love Katherine. 

Meet Heather D., a resident of Brooklyn who had a stock photo she posed for five years ago come back to haunt her this week. She explained in a series of Tweets: “Ultimate nightmare: in 2007 Julio and I got paid to do some cheesy stock photoshoot for Getty. They dressed us up in horrible clothes and now the photo is in the NY Post as the face of (disgusting) modern day hipsters. MORTIFIED! So the moral of the story is don’t pose for stock photos or else 5 years later you could find yourself destroying entire neighborhoods according to the New York Post.” The article ran on Sunday, and is titled “Attack of the hipsters: How they ‘ruined’ Williamsburg,” making Heather D. the face of a much-maligned generation of gentrifiers. We talked to her about it.
…
G: Any thoughts on the article itself?
HD: I think an article about hipsters moving to Williamsburg is probably about 5-10 years too late, but that seems just about on par with everything else in The New York Post so I guess it makes sense.

— 

Jen Carlson, “Stock Photo Hipster Talks About Gentrifying Brooklyn” (Gothamist)

This is hilarious. I wrote the piece they’re talking about here — which, as a couple of commenters point out, is a BOOK REVIEW, not “an article about hipsters moving to Williamsburg.” No one actually reads anymore, do they?

(via thediscography)

GREAT JOB, INTERNET! 

“Men fans”?

"We really flipped this model," said Editor-in-Chief Sally Lee. "Usually content creation begins with an editor. We have content creation that begins with a reader."  →

Not for nothing, but this model isn’t that new. (I suspect the editors will rewrite as much as, say, your generic aggregation-site employee would.)

sometimes i think the world would be a lot better if the phrase ‘a new study’ was banned from all journalistic and pseudo-journalistic enterprises

It would also make the people who write “Weekend Update” work a bit harder to stick their punchlines.

Convenient rule of thumb: Those people who consciously make an effort to let you know that they are "nerds" or "geeks" or some other subculture that has gone from mockable to sorta-cool-because-of-the-Internet? Are really just telling you that they're "annoyingly self-conscious."  →

You’re welcome!

(Source: staceyjoy)

"Popular." →

Except among, you know, the people who VOTED FOR AMERICAN IDOL.

And I mean Ester Dean has a lot of great songs under her belt (“Countdown” is pretty much my song of the summer and “Lay It Down” is a jam ps look for my Lloyd interview to go up later today) but she also has a credit on the Xtina Marilyn Manson remake. And “Firework.” And “S&M,” which is a TERRIBLE SONG and would be even if the lyrics weren’t as thoroughly depressing as they are.