GLITCHET

This article covers the incredible, diasporic spread of "creepypasta", copied and mutated stories designed to do nothing more than invoke Lovecraftian dread in you. Interesting musings on the genesis of creepypasta from lost-suppressed-horror-TV shows to forum-crowdsourced-urban legends, and how the author can judge their success by the obliteration of attribution as the work morphs and spreads like a dread virus.

The tl;ds (too scary; didn't read): it'd instantly nuke tons of ocean life and send massive amounts of radiation into our ocean. (And going off last week's news about plastic being in our salts, it will probably irradiate the things we eat from the ocean to a large extent.) And in case you don't know why this is relevant now, it's because Trump threatened to destroy the entire country of North Korea so North Korea is like well we'll just bomb the entire ocean as a show of force. Fun times!

Stolen tweets I can't remember: "who wants to tell them?" They were put into isolation in order to understand the psychological impacts of long-term space flight. Some pretty interesting stuff like how "all of their communications with the outside world were subjected to a 20-minute delay — the time it takes for signals to get from Mars to Earth" and devices that "could sense if people were avoiding one another, or if they were 'toe-to-toe'". They also had virtual reality devices to help with stress, allowing them to briefly go on vacation.

I find this interesting in that it's the first example I've seen of a meme creator actually asserting their creative copyright on characters or images that they created. I remember the artist who created the lolwut pear, ursulav, being frustrated about her complete lack of attribution despite its widespread use at one point on the internet. Luckily it seems like Pepe Papa Matt Furie has the resources and the fury (sorry) to actually go after people appropriating his work.

Want to read about a bunch of murderers who used the insanity plea, citing the belief that they were in the Matrix? Well, gee, do I have the article for you! It also covers some other types of insanity pleas and mostly covers its implications within the legal system. Warning: pretty gruesome descriptions within.

A beautiful longread on the steady progression from Zuck's knockoff hotornot for Harvard up to a world where our opinions, news, and information intake is gradually adjusted and by Facebook's algorithms. Am I leaving a tab open in Facebook to check for notifications, likes, and hot takes from my friends and only my friends? Yes.