NO PRESSURE THOUGH.

Today is #GivingTuesday, an opportunity for charities to pander to Millennials and major corporations to pander to everybody else. Alas, despite my cynicism, it IS kind of a nice idea and this video DID put me in the holiday spirit. So here, fwiw, are some charities you might want to #give #tue if you haven't done so yet. NO PRESSURE THOUGH. I'm not pandering. Anyway, the links!!

1. How video stores survive in the age of Netflix. By being shameless hipsters, apparently? Aside from that unusual entrepreneurial technique, a handful of hangers-on have forestalled the reign of streaming by turning themselves from straight-up stores to community hubs. (Community hubs for hipsters! But still.)

2. How digital maps have changed the way we see cities. Getting lost in a new place is actually a pretty difficult task, thanks to Google Maps, GPS, and the cavalcade of location-based apps that have followed. But the less we get lost, we less we see -- period. And maybe that isn't such a great thing.

3. The pains of growing up in the Internet's eye. I really cannot recommend this essay on teenage Internet celebrity highly enough, so I'll just quote from it at length here: "To live as a so-called 'internet celebrity' —that is, to upload the contents of one’s own life in its entirety—is to engage in a souped-up game of self-actualization ... In the game of internet celebrity, players engage in a constant and self-conscious cycle of meaning-making, in which even the most mundane artifacts of daily life can be cast and recast as necessary elements in a continuous and consumable personal plot."

Japan: Home of inspirational cats and insane "shrimp cannons." 7 million viewers do not lie, you guys.

Pocketable: On the odd, and oddly prophetic, history of the world's first erotic computer game. (2579 words/10 minutes)

Postscripts: A party for Whisper. A shock collar for humans. A fact check for UberFacts, which often are ... not. What happens when you click a link and what Harry Potter spells actually mean. The cost of everything in the “Blank Space” video. Yet another teenager more accomplished than me. Here’s some sexy hedgehog erotica and here's a bb otter in need of a name. Last but certainlyyy not least: how MS paint became the language of Internet conspiracy.

Until tomorrow!
@caitlindewey

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