Some idiot went on a crusade last week to get as many naked snaps as possible from random users, took screenshots of them all and put them on a (now shut down) Tumblr, “Snapchat Sluts,” leading to another round of articles about how the app is just for sexting.

The narrative goes something like this: self-destructing photos have to be nude, otherwise why would they be self-destructing? Then Snapchat isn’t even a good sexting app — recent articles have pointed to the screenshot ability and the public top Snapchat friends lists as ways to get caught with your pants down or ways for your spouse to discover you cheating.

— “Snapchat isn’t even a good sexting app!” This tech crunch post is kind of hilarious by how indignant it is about the alleged sexting (Your wife will catch you!)  and how “whatever” it is about the Snapchat Sluts tumblr.

“I am totally going to this neighborhood party today.”- Nathaniel

When I try to explain the academic labor model…

Twitter is bragging because it didn’t go down on Election Day. The info-bloat peaked at 327,452 tweets-per-minute last night, and not a single Fail Whale appeared! High fives all around! Way to… work like you’re supposed to.

It’s just another symptom of the ever-growing beta culture plague. And it sucks.

Because, reading Twitter’s own statements and the commentary by some of the press, it appears that you all should be grateful that Twitter didn’t collapse in on itself. After years of crapping out constantly, Twitter didn’t crap out yesterday. Not crapping out—even while you weren’t supposed to crap out in the first place—is what counts as a raging success nowadays.

Yes, maybe that’s the benchmark of excellence now. Here, Twitter. Take a medal for not sucking.

After all, the tech world is now pure beta culture. It permeates everything—software, hardware and internet services. The planet is bursting with half-baked products and features full of bugs and pathetic excuses.

— 

Jesus Diaz: “Why Twitter’s Election Night Success Is Not a Success”

Yeah. Beta isn’t infrastructure.

I saw Gillard’s speech live on television and registered that it was important. But I looked again on YouTube this week to see how it might appear to the casual viewer, local or international, days, weeks, even years from now. What I think I missed the first time is how the reaction of the Opposition Leader adds to the tension and, in turn, validates what Gillard is saying. Every man would recognise the flicker of panic in Abbott’s eyes, when he switches from blokey guffaw to “hang on, she might have a point”. This is the son being told off by the mother, the partner being given the ultimatum.

The moment can never be re-created, but the clip doesn’t suffer from replay because of the uniqueness of the moment. This is about both of them. The personal context matters because Abbott and Gillard were old-school political buddies before they faced off at the 2010 federal election. Scroll down the page on YouTube and there is a clip titled “Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard flirting”, which was uploaded in 2007. It is a cut and paste of an appearance on the Nine Network’s Today show and is jarring with the hindsight of their mutual loathing as leaders. (It has had more views than Rudd’s apology speech.)

What Gillard’s speech clarified is that Abbott doesn’t understand his opponent, even if he once got on well with her. He mistook her silence before last week as weakness. She didn’t react to the taunts because she didn’t want to seem shrill. He kept pressing, expecting that she would eventually crack. But she was biding her time, waiting for the opportunity when he over-reached.

There was another look that crossed his face - exhaustion. He seemed to shrink as she approached her finale. Then, with a gesture that could never be scripted, she mocked him as he glanced at his watch. Abbott threw his hands up, the child protesting to the mother that he wasn’t guilty of that too. The theatre was the story; an irony given the self-serving critique that the press gallery has faced on social media.

— George Melaogenes from The Australian on Julia Gillard’s Feminist Troll Moment

yet what happens to the blogs and tumblrs, these infinite, immaterial notebooks? one can erase them but even then they may persist, traces of them still saved somewhere on the internet. who is archiving these scraps of our existence? those who decide what is important or not to archive. who to preserve, what to throw away. if you are important enough, john tells me, any note or scribble relating to your work is valuable…this is a memory campaign. who is canonized, who is remembered.

— kate zambreno, heroines  (via karaj)

The “Male Etiquette” thread on Quora is BLOWING MY MIND. It’s pretty much the tumblr misandry tag.

I stopped taking my medication when I got pregnant with Milo. After I gave birth, I nursed him for a year. I should have gone back on it then, but the project of making an appointment and making it into the city with the baby was overwhelming, and I was always going to do it “tomorrow.” And then my doctor retired, and I would have needed to find a new doctor and show them my medical transcripts, etc, and it became even more insurmountable. And then I got pregnant again. And now I’m nursing again, so.

I want to go back to school for my teaching certification. I know that in order for this to happen, I am going to have to go back on medication. And I know that many people scoff at this idea that ADD is a real thing. “You just need to stop daydreaming. You’re just being lazy,” they say. I say the same thing to myself. The reality of it though, to me, is that it’s much more than just daydreaming or being lazy. I feel like I’m at the end of a very long tunnel, trying to peer out the small opening in the other end where I can see small glimpses of people going about their daily lives, just taking care of business like it ain’t no thang. And, god, I want to be like that.
Will someone do me a favor in about 6 months and ask me if I’ve made a doctor’s appointment for myself so I can get back to my life?

— 

The Kids Have Arrived

True to life.

I can’t help but see an element of self-preservation amid our data collection. Preservation embedded deep within our check-ins, our food photos, our tracked steps and mapped run routes. We are collecting like never before.

We used to collect privately. The physical possessions one owns when one dies constitutes, perhaps, an idealization of the self. Those possessions, however, have always been unnetworked. And they were limited by physics; you could only collect so much. Closets filled, things decayed, people moved, treasures were thrown away.

Now the collection is boundless. The space near infinite. Every single item collected is plugged into the network. And so that self—that idealization—suddenly flows fast and far. It touches other selfs, other idealizations. It can be reconstituted by data mappers.

— 

Paris and the Data Mind

So, in lieu of a self-challenge that involves anything healthy or enriching, I’ve made it my goal to listen to the Misfits every day during the month of October. This has been a wonderful plan. I have fantasies of being a Real Hausfrau of whatever and staging an elaborate children’s halloween party featuring a Misfits cover band, comprised of children, doing g-rated versions of all the classics for the delight of my imaginary fellow hausfraus and their spoiled children. Obviously my first choice would be for the Danzig impersonator to be a 6 year old girl.

But by far my favorite part of this ritual is listening to “TV Casualty”, and the point where, when listing off all of the things the scary television has done to him, Danzig drones about the “Christmas cards to which I’ve never replied!” How hilariously banal. That’s the point, right?