A pick of the most interesting things I read this week. If you’d like to get Pocket Lint as a regular-ish weekly email on Fridays you can sign up here or using the form below. Pocket Lint will be on holiday for a few weeks after this week’s instalment.
Is the Oculus Rift sexist? “[B]iological men were significantly more likely to prioritize motion parallax. Biological women relied more heavily on shape-from-shading. In other words, men are more likely to use the cues that 3D virtual reality systems relied on.”
Facebook doesn’t care about your brand. “You want to achieve reach because you’ve made something good that people want to share. And if you’ve made something good or interesting, then people will be sharing it organically in any case.”
In praise of brevity: “Like passengers in a lifeboat, all the words in a concise text must pull their own weight.”
Clickbait journalism didn’t start with the internet. From 1873: “Our four or five thousand daily and weekly publications have columns of “Nuts to Crack,” “Sunbeams,” “Sparks from the Telegraph,” “Freshest Gleanings,” “Odds and Ends,” “News Sprinklings,” “Flashes of Fun,” “Random Readings,” “Mere Mentions,” “Humor of the Day,” “Quaint Sayings,” “Current Notes,” “Things in General,” “Brevities,” “Witticisms,” “Notes of the Day,” “Jottings,” “All Sorts,” “Editor’s Drawer,” “Sparks,” “Fun and Folly,” “Fact and Fiction”…”
The problem of choice in interactive narratives: The real destination is the creation of meaning, whether that be the reader’s interpretation or reconstructing the author’s intent. The work is not completed by reading the final page but by reading the all of the pages.
How can we preserve Twitch Plays Pokemon?
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
The definitive ranking of Robin’s 359 exclamations from ‘Batman’
Piipshow, a webcam feed from a Norwegian bird feeder dressed to look like a coffee bar.
Tumblr of the week: Fat birds
Poem of the week: Frank O’Hara, Steps
Free game of the week: Super Hot
