Culture

Online shopping hit a new peak over the 2023 holiday season — and now the returns are upon us. But as online shopping gets increasingly competitive, there are new struggles around return policies. That may be an area for increased competition:

Okay. So there’s something called a “Disney Day Drinkers Club” (more than 85,000 members!) and their mascot is a trash can called “Binny.” Disney has moved the trash can.

It’s one thing when it’s Spotify, Apple Music, or SoundCloud, but these recaps from Culver’s, Dunkin (it dropped the “Donuts” from its name in 2019), Chick-fil-A, and Shake Shack are taking the whole year-end recap trend a little too far. Especially when they’re personalized.

Among the movies featured: The Cassandra Cat (1962), a Czeckoslovak film about a cat who wears sunglasses and reveals human nature. This is a code red for cat people.

Can you guess which national parks these people are reviewing?

“Partnerships like this should complicate this story of inevitability for companies like OpenAI, the world-beating firm that, before it takes over the economy, and before it must be stopped from taking over the entire world, must first, for some reason, pay for a big subscription to Politico Pro.”

Ten years old, but new to me: a website that plays a tone every time a Wikipedia page is updated. It’s a soothing antidote to ... basically every other browser tab, at this point.

Even as big advertisers exit, sports Twitter has continued going strong. But now the official Threads account announced that sports/NBA Twitter’s newsbreaker Adrian Wojnarowski “has landed” and is doing a Q&A Friday.

Wikipedia has released its top articles of the year, and numero uno is one on ChatGPT. In a morbid twist, “Deaths in 2023” came in second.

The theme park / immersive art exhibition (yes, you read that right) is a real thing, and the Los Angeles Times has a great story about it with some really cool photos. It will apparently open sometime this winter.

Its Android app is testing a new feature that’ll warn users before replying to old posts or posts from people they don’t follow, asking them to make a great first impression.

Last night, a friend pointed me to Radio Garden. The site (or iOS app) is simple, presenting a swipe-able digital Earth covered in green dots. Some represent collections of local stations, and some, like the lonely, all-shellac-78s Arctic Outpost AM1270, solemnly broadcast into the Earth’s farthest reaches.

After 15 years of Android, Google’s blog post walking down memory lane didn’t do much for me beyond one note about 2017’s Android 8 (Oreo) launch and the big emoji problem that was so important that CEO Sundar Pichai got involved.

UploadVR spotted a “coming soon” listing for VRChat, the virtual reality social platform, in the app store for the ByteDance-owned Pico 4 headset.

We haven’t updated this timeline of ill-fated celebrity “creative directors” for tech companies in several years, but something about today’s calorie-free Paris Hilton / X announcement really cements my belief that we’re just reliving 2015 on the internet in every way.

In a galaxy far, far, away, jazz doesn’t exist. Instead, when you want to really blow on that horn you’re jizzing or jatzing. As AVClub recently noted, both words have technically been used to describe the musical stylings of the Star Wars universe over the years, with jizz gaining in popularity for extremely obvious reasons.

Consumers, states, and the FTC are taking marketing claims from wellness companies more seriously — and, increasingly, there are legal consequences.

Writer, comedian and YouTuber Demi Adejuyigbe had a long-running bit of increasingly elaborate videos for September 21, featuring an edit of the Earth, Wind and Fire song. You can relive them today!

Perhaps you’ve seen them: two girls, one wordlessly mixing a drink while the other one snacks. Why don’t they talk?

The iconic Phil Collins song has been reworked with “football centric verses” from Snoop; the all-important drums are being played by legendary touring drummer Cindy Blackman Santana. Incredible quotes from the USA Today story about the project as well:

Wild times on the playa.