Instagram's charismatic android leader SYSTROM Mk. IX called a press conference yesterday to announce the invention, at long last, of picture-messaging! Making frequent reference to "our shared human feelings that we share with other human people that are human like us" and "delicious puppies," he explained that we can now finally send pictures to each other from our Facestagram devices. Unstoppable innovation from the realistically anthropomorphic SYSTROM and the whole team over there. Maybe they'll figure out a way to share audio messages next!!
Twitter made some changes to its "block" feature yesterday, making it more of a mute button where blocked users were hidden from you, but not you from them; a one-way mirror rather than a curtain. People were mad. Real mad. Twitter execs rushed into an emergency meeting and then reverted all the changes, announcing that the engineer who pushed them out would be executed for "attempting to overthrow the block feature by all sorts of intrigues and despicable methods with a wild ambition to grab the supreme power of our micro-blogging service." UK paper The Telegraph obtained photos of today's DevOps all-hands where this promise was apparently carried out. Our condolences to the traitor's family, and thanks to Dear Twitter for its continued benevolent leadership and supremely admirable product design.
Also in Tech: $75 million B-round closed for Lawnmower Man style virtual reality face-television. Jessica "The Information" Lessin threw a big party for all her tech industry pals, which helps explain why she can't ever seem to name a source for anything.
Remember yesterday's Tumblr misogynist Mika Schiller? Well he took down the post and put up this one, describing it as "a social experiment." If so, it's a social experiment that Schiller has been pursuing for quite a while on hisFacebook and Twitter accounts. Keep on "experimenting," bro.
Today in That Utterly Bonkers S.A. Interpreter Story: So the fake/hallucinating South African sign language interpreter was apparently charged with MURDER in 2003 but found unfit to stand trial. His record also includes charges of "rape (1994), theft (1995), housebreaking (1997), malicious damage to property (1998), murder, attempted murder and kidnapping (2003)." Oh. Kay.
More Things That Are Bananapants: Lisa Frank Inc.: The Rainbow Gulag. Kidnapped American Robert Levinson really was in Iran on a secret mission for the CIA. The one person who has ever been glad she read the comments. Late last night, with no warning, Beyoncé released a whole album on iTunes, including videos for every song. And the whole internet basically went squee forever.
Fox News is like a super-fun children's ball pit except the children are grownup idiots and the balls are racist opinions.
Rich teen drives drunk, kills four people, and is not held responsible due to having never been held responsible for anything before. Welcome to the age of "Affluenza."
Three sick bastards at Buzzfeed found the 50 worst things on the internet from 2013. My STRONG advice is don't click anything that says "Click to Reveal." I am serious here. Don't do it.
Today in Alexis Madrigal: Bot Traffic & The Stream. Apropos of the latter, Balk reminds us that lol nothing matters.
That's it, it's Friday and this cat is me:
Today's Song: I mean Beyonce, what else would it be?
Today's Song You Can Listen To Without Buying Beyonce: Frank Ocean, "Swim Good"
~Got some pretty good tabs on this 808 CD, yeah~
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