Category: Internet Culture

How Reddit made my wish come true: being a Graphic Designer.

I woke up yesterday feeling creative, wanting to draw something. When I created my template for the 2017 Formula 1 car and uploaded it to reddit’s /r/formula1 subreddit about one and a half months ago, people over there suggested I try my hand at Adobe Illustrator. Well, yesterday morning I thought “hell, lets give it a try”, so I installed an older version of Illustrator (CS6) and looked up a video through google on how to draw in this particular program, giving me this tutorial. I decided I wanted to draw...

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Bethesda No Longer Gives Out Review Copies In Advance. Good.

The latest drama in the strange world that is video games, is the fact that Bethesda (known for games like Skyrim, Fallout, and the recent Doom) has decided to no longer send out review copies ahead of the launch of their new games (note: just one day in advance). Games journalists, journalists, and gamers alike are outraged by this decision. This is yet another move by a big game publisher which tarnishes the trust between producer and consumer. At least, to the people who care enough about video games to...

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Pokemon Go: Delving into the Statistics of Evolutions

Pokemon Go is taking the world by storm. I wrote an article about my first experiences with the game a few weeks ago. At the time, I was working on my master’s thesis, which was a quantitative content analysis. I performed that analysis with SPSS, a statistical program created by IBM. I used Pokemon Go to recharge the battery in between sessions, catching loads of pokemon. Mostly Weedles, Pidgeys and Rattata’s. Because I was in a statistical mood due to my thesis, I decided to keep track of evolutions, to...

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How To Make Dota 2 eSports Even Better

I love Dota 2. I love playing it, and I love watching live tournaments – online. However, something has started to bother me. While some teams get invited, they perform poorly. Exemplified by the victory of Team OG today, a new team which showed every directly invited team who’s boss. Do we really need direct invites anymore? If you’re like me, you just saw Team OG take a convincing victory over Team Secret in the final of the Frankfurt Major, taking 1.1 million dollar of prize money from the 3...

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South Park; Destroying ‘Social Justice’ through Satire

For my Master’s in Political Communication, we got the assignment to write a ‘blog post’ of 500-600 words. The subject needed to be media and how they affected the discourse used in Politics. I decided to do things a little differently, instead writing about how media respond to a particular political trend in society. We were also encouraged to publish our blog post online. It isn’t exactly thorough, but still, here it is!  There’s a worrying trend making its rounds on the internet. The particular trend I am talking about...

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Incite Drama: The Emma Watson Hoax Explained

Emma Watson, star of movies like ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’, was rumoured to have her nudes leaked. It turned out to be a hoax, and was widely reported. The hoax itself, however, was another hoax, orchestrated by someone or some group. This article tries to find some truth in all the rumours. On the 21st of September a fairly unknown site called FoxWeekly.com went viral. The topic being a story about alleged leaked nudes of Emma Watson. The site linked to a page titled ‘Emma...

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‘4chan is kill’. How An Internet Dinosaur Was Brought Down

A rift has appeared among the ranks of 4chan, with large quantities of users bidding the website farewell in favour of alternatives like 8chan.co. How could it be that the most infamous community found on the internet has started to break up? Over a decade has ruled the darker sides of the internet. What does this mean? During the last few weeks, a lot of big and important things happened on the internet. GamerGate, The Fappening, and the death of 4chan. Is 4chan really dead? No, it isn’t, but it...

What media get wrong about ‘The Fappening’ 1

What media get wrong about ‘The Fappening’

A few days ago, there it was. Candid nudeshots of lots of celebrities. It was quickly called ‘the fappening’, dubbed after a pun between ‘fapping’ (masturbating) and ‘the happening’ (a buzzword used by lots of self-important hipsters). Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, some Disney stars I don’t know; all had their private pictures leak from ‘iCloud’, Apple’s cloud-storing program. Mainstream media jumped on this opportunity to blast sites like 4chan and Reddit for spreading these images, often calling those who did ‘vile, creepy 14-year olds’.  Though that may...