Culture encompasses books, movies, television, music, video games, internet memes, and thousands of branches of art. And sure, culture includes the latest entertainment news too. At The Verge, we construct entry points both into the mainstream and the niche, the tentpoles and the hidden gems, to help make the most notable and discussed parts of the cultural conversation understandable and accessible to everyone.
Here’s a profile of a 34-year-old social network, ECHO, run by a woman named Stacy Horn:
At its peak in the late ’90s, ECHO had 3,500 members. Among them: writers, artists, musicians, actors, therapists, and even, briefly, John F. Kennedy Jr.
Now it has just 43 users.
[MIT Technology Review]
Anyone else remember playing Tetris on a graphing calculator against a schoolmate with another graphing calculator using a 3.5mm audio jack “link cable” — all while your geometry teacher kindly looked the other way?
We are so far past that now, people. (via Gizmodo)
People are getting arrested at the airport for smuggling hundreds of pounds of Fruit Roll-Ups into the country! Incredible.
In late April, the agency said, an American couple were caught, each carrying a suitcase filled with more than 185 pounds of Fruit Roll-Ups, part of a haul of nearly 375 pounds. The Tax Authority also shared a video of the unusual discovery, which appeared to show a customs official sifting through several suitcases filled only with hundreds of the small silver and red foil packets. […]
A man’s voice in the video can be heard answering why he had filled two checked bags with Fruit Roll-Ups. “It has something to do with ice cream,” he said, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
[The New York Times]
Yes, it has been 10 years since Get Lucky came out.
The Daft Punk duo split up in 2021, but they have fresh, previously unreleased material for you to listen to on a 10th Anniversary Edition of their fourth and final studio album, like this demo and animated music video for “Infinity Repeating.”
You can stream the album on Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, and other services, or head to Daft Punk’s website to snag a physical copy (vinyl or CD — no tapes) and associated merch.
Online pop music fans have been in a tizzy the past few days over rumors that Flatiron Books was planning to publish a high-profile book about, as the Times put it, “a pop culture phenomenon.” A leading theory was that Taylor Swift might be the subject. The book’s release date of July 9th is, as the Swifties will know, featured prominently in Swift’s song Last Kiss.
Alas, Flatiron has quashed that rumor: The July 9th release is called Beyond The Story: 10-Year Record of BTS, and it’s about — you guessed it — BTS. (July 9th is also a significant day for the BTS Army; it’s the day of the fandom’s official founding.)
[The New York Times]
Heather Armstrong, who started the Dooce.com blog in 2001, has died at the age of 47.
A 2019 Vox profile recounts that her blog grew into a business earning $40,000 per month from banner ads in 2009. It spawned an entire industry of influencer copycats.
Andy Baio writes about Armstrong on Waxy:
Heather was the consummate poster, sharp and hilarious, famously sharing her personal life on her blog, finding early fame getting fired (“dooced”) for writing about her coworkers, and later writing extensively about motherhood while raising her two children. She was a well-documented pioneer in how to make a living writing independently online.
The cult hit web comic sprawled in literary scope, pushing author Chris Onstad to burnout. Now, he thinks an AI might help him manage it.
A long-running web community enlisted its goons to stop an Imgur extinction event.
Us, after a long holiday weekend, but also Billy McFarland, the tech bro influencer / fraudster behind Fyre Festival, aka one of the worst pop culture moments that you’d maybe just started to forget about.
McFarland was released last fall after serving a few years in prison and is apparently ready to sell people on another dream to pay off the millions in restitution he still owes for the old one — a disaster big enough that it made our lists for worst pop culture moments of 2017 and tech flops from the last decade.
Nobody wants them. Nobody likes them. Why is the worst UI element of all time ubiquitous again?
Over the years, Mastodon has occasionally seen the number of incoming users shift from a flood to a trickle and back again.
While the flow of people jumping over from Twitter now is slower than it was shortly after Musk’s takeover, as of this weekend the “fediverse” microblogging platform now has over 10 million registered accounts across known server instances.
Some Verge writers are among those registered — if you’re looking for someone to follow then here you go.
AI chat systems put a new, sometimes solipsistic twist on the fannish roleplaying tradition.
On The Talk Show, John Gruber and Jason Kottke got way down in the weeds on the evolution of blogging, what it means to be A Blogger, how social media changed what it means to write on the internet, and much more. There’s like a whole hour just about headlines! It’s super nerdy and super fun.
[daringfireball.net]
A revealing look at the threats posted by AI junk
The community over at Stripperweb has questions for the forum’s anonymous owner after a banner appeared last week announcing that, for reasons unknown, it would be shutting down on February 1st.
Described as the “Holy Grail of strippers’ knowledge,” some sex workers are offering to buy the site, while others have swiftly learned Python in order to preserve the forum’s vast resources and history.
So it’s time to break out the lotions, carbs, and the internet’s favorite local news report. At least we have Samsung Unpacked, the big Mobile World Congress show, and death to look forward to.
Tumblr connoisseurs may remember the tale of the Second Century Warlord. If you’re one of them, I promise you’ve never heard it like this.
At nine years old, Dieunerst Collin entered meme immortality via this 2013 Vine clip comparing the side-eyeing youth to Lil Terrio, and since he was at a Popeyes, he became the “Popeyes Kid.”
Now Collin is a redshirt freshman at center on the football team for Lake Erie College, and — with a little pressure from social media — has signed a “Name, Image and Likeness” (NIL) sponsorship deal with Popeyes.
Less than a month after publishing an article about how The Youth are totally into flip phones these days, The New York Times is talking about how Gen Z is obsessed with crappy old digital cameras. As a 26 year-old who went through a CoolPix phase in college, then a film phase, and who just bought another point-and-shoot, I just want the kids to know I support them.
[The New York Times]
Twitter is creaking. Social media seems less fun than ever. Maybe it’s time to get a little more personal.
Finding a place to call your own in Eorzea is a bureaucratic nightmare.
