Internet Culture

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.

Finally, India’s vast English-language speaking population just can’t log-off — articles on the 2023 Cricket World Cup and the Indian Premier League come next in the ranking. You can see the full list of popular Wikipedia articles below.

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.

Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko says the goal is to “curb unnecessary negativity” that’s common on the internet. Mastodon is your new think before you reply coach.

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.

James did a good job documenting the unexpectedly simple, nostalgic joy of Radio Garden in his Verge story years ago.

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.

For some reason, the Android 8.0 emoji for cheeseburger and beer had some odd mistakes (the originals are on top, see if you can spot the differences) that were fixed a few months later with the release of Android 8.1.

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

I wonder if that Four Seasons Total Landscaping hangout is still around.

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.

But in a recent short story collection based around Return of the Jedi characters, Max Rebo, the blue alien front man for the band that plays at Jabba the Hutt’s palace thinks back to other times he’s performed “jatz standards”. That means jatz is the official Disney-approved name for the music.

Wookiepedia, meanwhile, continues to embrace jizz.

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

The lawsuits come as online promoters move from endorsing other companies’ products to creating and pushing their own. Meanwhile regulators are looking more closely at influencer marketing, which is expected to exceed $21 billion this year, according to an industry report.

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!

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

Honestly, the internet is too loud. The feed is too loud. TikTok is too loud. I’m scrolling and I just want everyone to shut the fuck up.

Turns out it’s still possible to have mystique on social media.

and wondered how an unlicensed two hour film could exist when even Disney had to negotiate with Sony to use the character in films. Sony, Disney, and Marvel are all very protective of the character so it’s a surprise to see this film still live. It’s also super unusual to see a fan film of this scope outside of the Star Trek fan film community, especially as the last time a Star Trek fan film attempted a project of this high a production quality level Paramount sued the creator.

Spider-Man: Lotus’s other major problem is it was funded by a non-profit more than two years ago and immediately faced challenges after the VFX team quit due to racist remarks previously made, separately, by the lead actor and the director.

The Internet Archive’s Great 78 project launched in 2017 and streams thousands of digitized 78rpm discs and cylinder recordings for free. Now music labels, including Universal, Sony, and Concord, are suing, citing 2,749 sound-recording copyrights they say it’s infringed and pointing to the Music Modernization Act of 2018 (via Reuters).

They’re pursuing damages of up to $412 million, while the Archive is also battling book publishers in court over its National Emergency Library program.

For more information on the Music Modernization Act, check out this episode of The Vergecast.

In this episode of Andscape’s Rap Stories podcast series, David Dennis and Curren$y recap the “blog era” of rap music that existed in the late ‘00s by pinpointing exactly why it was so relatable.

There are other podcasts specifically dedicated to this period, but the Smoking Section alum and Pilot Talk artist are more qualified than most to talk about what it was like.

Apollo app developer Christian Selig dropped new wallpaper art of a cute hybrid of Clippy and the Reddit alien today.

Selig has been hawking fun wallpapers for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS via the Apollo app since Reddit started down a dark path of hostile changes earlier this year and Selig shuttered the popular third-party Reddit client. He’s also selling the wallpapers outside the app.

And the German flag apparently expanded to fill the new space within under three minutes. How did they do it? According to Redditor HellsOnWheels45, a Discord server with 50,000 users in active coordination.

Also, protest messages have made a comeback on r/place after largely disappearing by Friday evening, with more “fuck spez’ messages near the center of the canvas.