Here’s a sage piece of advice for you: think twice before you meme.
If only someone had given this advice to UK football club Manchester United, they would not be in the situation they are in now.
The club’s attempt at a “not a cellphone in sight” meme has backfired spectacularly, since no one appeared to check the photo in the meme for… cellphones.
Man Utd tweeted out a photo on Wednesday night showing footballer Jesse Lingard facing an eager crowd, with the caption: “not a cellphone in sight, just people living in the moment.”
But, if you look closely at the photo, you’ll see not one but several cellphones.
Gloating Twitter followers were quick to point out the club’s major meme blunder.
All in all, fans were able to spot three phones in the photo.
Just like, at least check the background of the photo before you tweet it out, guys.
K-Pop superstars BTS don’t just have fans. They have an army. And when BTS member Min Yoon-gi (AKA Suga) tweeted a mysterious photo at Ed Sheeran, that army couldn’t stay calm.
Despite Ed Sheeran not being on twitter (his profile is still up, but has been inactive since 2017), Suga tagged him in a tweet featuring a photo of a screen showing a waveform diagram of a song.
“hmm… this is for you @edsheeran#SUGA,” Suga wrote in the caption. The tweet currently has 355K retweets and 906K likes.
If you look closely on the screen, you can see that the project file depicted is saved as “Ed Sheeran ST rough,” probably meaning the rough cut of a song.
Needless to say, fans were pretty enticed by this very mysterious, teasing tweet.
BTS has previously broken world records for Twitter engagements for a music group. The boyband’s tweets have an average of 252,200 retweets, while the rest of us out here are happy when our number of retweets reaches double digits.
If this collab is in fact happening, it’s bound to break the internet. Or at least break Spotify.
On Wednesday, Variety broke the news that Ryan Reynolds will be producing The Patient Who Nearly Drove Me Out of Medicine — a horror story based on a series originally published by writer Jasper DeWitt on Reddit’s r/nosleep sub.
Reynolds has since retweeted the story, and DeWitt has also posted about it.
DeWitt originally posted his story as a nine-part series, the first instalment of which was published on r/nosleep in December 2016. The posts have been upvoted thousands of times, and received hundreds of comments.
For anyone unfamiliar with NoSleep, the community describes itself as “a place for realistic horror stories”. Posters share fiction, mostly written in first person, which other users then comment on as if the stories shared really took place.
“Everything is true here, even if it’s not,” reads a line in the community details.
DeWitt’s story is still available to read on the sub:
NoSleep currently has close to 13 million subscribers, and this wouldn’t be the first time fiction posted there has gone on to be published or adapted.
One of the most famous examples of this is Penpal, a novel by Dathan Auerbach that also began as a serialisation. After the story went viral on Reddit, Auerbach raised close to $16,000 via Kickstarter in order to turn the story into a book.
Judging by the fact Auerbach’s second novel has recently been published by Doubleday, DeWitt could well have bright things in his future.
Mashable has reached out to DeWitt, and Reynolds’ representatives, for comment.
Here’s a fact about 5G phones you probably didn’t think about: They’ll be expensive — at least at first.
According to OnePlus CEO Pete Lau, who spoke with The Verge, OnePlus is indeed working on a 5G phone, but it’ll cost $200 to $300 more than the company’s upcoming 4G flagship phone.
Lau didn’t share any more details — “there’s a lot of specifics still to look at,” he said — but it sounds like OnePlus just can’t make the 5G phone as cheap as it’d like to, so it’s switched to working on two flagships in parallel, something the company hasn’t done before.
Another reason might be the phone’s looks. Due to the antenna design required for 5G, Lau says it “appears impossible to make a nice-looking flagship device, for now.”
We do know some details about the company’s 5G phone from an earlier announcement. It’ll launch in Europe first, on EE’s network, and it will sport Qualcomm’s latest and greatest Snapdragon 855 processor. No exact release date has been set.
But why launch a 5G phone at all if it’s going to be that expensive? According to Lau, it’s about learning about the technology and how best to integrate it into a phone before it becomes commonplace.
Lau’s comments give us some idea of how much other 5G phones will cost when they hit the market. Most major smartphone makers (with the probable exception of Apple) are planning to launch a 5G phone next year, but if you want those mind-boggling data transfer speeds, expect to pay a couple hundred bucks extra.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is leading an argument that a past bipartisan agreement gives zero dollars to President Trump for his border wall. | John Shinkle/POLITICO
Lawmakers are fighting over the definition of a ‘wall’ as the shutdown deadline approaches.
Democrats and Republicans can’t even agree on the definition of a border wall — let alone the project itself — and the rift could lead to a partial government shutdown later this month.
Senators came to a bipartisan agreement this summer to provide $1.6 billion for 65 miles of a beefed-up barrier along the Southwest border. While not enough for President Donald Trump, the deal marked a breakthrough on an otherwise intractable fight over the president’s chief campaign promise.
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But now the two parties can’t even agree on whether the $1.6 billion is for Trump’s wall or not. The legislation seems to purposefully avoid addressing Trump’s vision of a massive concrete border wall, instead using the word “fencing” and limiting repairs to “currently deployed fencing design along the southern border.”
That has led Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to argue that the bill gives Trump zero dollars for the “wall” and instead provides for “border security,” even as some progressives urge the Senate to abandon the deal. In the face of Schumer’s stance, Republicans are defending the $1.6 billion pact as giving the president exactly what he’s requesting, worried that may be all that can get through the Senate and that anything more would lead to a shutdown just days before Christmas.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who wrote the border funding bill with Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) in June, said it is “not accurate” for Schumer and Senate Democrats to claim it stiffs Trump on his beloved wall.
“It’s for a wall system. It is a lot of wall, but it is also a part of a system. And then we have additional add-ons in the bill that have more manpower and more technology,” Capito said, referring to millions more for additional border security.
The disagreement over what the bill actually does, she added, is “a problem. It’s a big problem.”
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) rejected Capito’s characterization of the bill: “I don’t think any of it goes towards a ‘wall.’”
“The money is going towards border security in general, and, frankly, the White House has already gotten money…that they still haven’t spent,” Duckworth said. “The president said Mexico is going to pay for a wall, so he should find money for that first. But as far as border security? I think everyone in the Senate supports more security.”
That may be true in principle, but the word “wall” has become a lightning rod for both political parties as they prepare for a funding fight that must be resolved by Dec. 21. Some conservative Republicans want as much as $25 billion for the border wall alone, while progressive activists have cast the $1.6 billion as intended “to terrorize immigrant communities.”
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said the Senate needs to figure out a way to please everyone and fast: “The government can’t close,” she implored her colleagues in an interview, predicting Congress will compromise on an amount greater than $1.6 billion for border barriers. Whether people will call it a wall or not is another question entirely.
“It depends on how you define border security. And part of it clearly is for the wall,” she said. “Maybe we can reach an agreement where everyone can call it what they want.”
It’s “optics,” agreed Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). “There’s no such thing as a wall. From a safety standpoint there’s … high fencing, so I don’t know. I think it’s just semantics right now, just get over it.”
Yet what seems like inside baseball is actually the whole ballgame to the president, who balked at signing a spending bill in March because it fell far short of his spending ambitions for the wall. He’s dug in even more this time.
“Top Border Security, including a Wall, is $25 Billion. Pays for itself in two months. Get it done!” he tweeted this week.
And Trump himself appears to be playing close attention to the debate. He’s spoken several times with Republican leaders about the matter and seems dead set on finally getting this win.
Schumer sees it another way, accusing Trump of “trying to manufacture a shutdown to fire up his base.” He and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are expected to meet with the president next week, in part to discuss how to fund the government.
In an interview with POLITICO last week, Trump said he wants $5 billion for the border wall alone and additional money for border security, a sign that the president is being kept apprised of the details during the back and forth between lawmakers.
The president is fixated on winning the border wall fight, putting other priorities on the back burner and raising the stakes for both parties. Senate Democrats say $1.6 billion was hard enough to get through the Senate Appropriations Committee; that it matches the initial White House request; and that it provides more than the $1.3 billion the president received for a border barrier last year.
“We did a deal six months ago on $1.6 billion which is what the president asked for. That was before the election, it’s done. If the president says ‘No, we’re going to shut the government down for five [billion dollars],’ I think that’s unfair,” Tester said. “If he reneges on it, I think it’s bad, bad, bad.”
A news release accompanying the bill in June from the Appropriations Committee boasted that it “fully funds” Trump’s fiscal 2019 request for the border wall system.
That measure would almost certainly pass the Senate, though House Republicans are still in the majority and have pushed for $5 billion for the wall. They might need Democratic votes to pass anything, leading to a stalemate that’s dragged on for a month since the election.
And if Trump doesn’t get $5 billion for a concrete border wall, there’s no guarantee he would sign whatever Congress passes, though some lawmakers are bullish they can write the legislation to satisfy everyone.
“It’s just a matter of what you call it,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) of the border security funding.
House Democrats, meanwhile, are looking to give Trump a goose egg for Christmas on his chief legislative priority. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said the caucus is willing to talk about a compromise on cracking down on drug dealers or human traffickers “but not on the fence or the wall.”
That’s left Republicans in a difficult place. Trump has told Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) directly that he wants three times the funding that Shelby’s committee approved.
Regardless, there’s no way the GOP will concede that the bipartisan bill doesn’t meet the president’s definition of a wall.
“I thought it was for the wall. My understanding is it’s for the wall,” Shelby said. He added with a grin: “Maybe other people’s understanding is it’s border security.”
Heather Caygle and Sarah Ferris contributed to this report.
The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is expected to agree to cut oil production at a meeting aimed at supporting oil prices.
Representatives from some of the world’s top oil producers are due to meet on Thursday in Vienna, following a recent decline in the price of the commodity.
Hours before the meeting, US President Donald Trump called on OPEC and its allies to keep oil production high, so that prices remained low for the foreseeable future.
“Hopefully OPEC will be keeping oil flows as is, not restricted. The World does not want to see, or need, higher oil prices!” said Trump, who has in the past repeatedly accused the cartel of keeping prices artificially high.
Hopefully OPEC will be keeping oil flows as is, not restricted. The World does not want to see, or need, higher oil prices!
But OPEC and its partners, who account for more than half of the world’s oil output, are planning to throttle production, which could lead to rising oil prices.
“Yes, we will have a cut,” Oman‘s oil minister Mohammed bin Hamad Al Rumhi said on Wednesday evening.
His comments were echoed by his Nigeriancounterpart.
By how much oil production will be reduced is unclear, but de facto leader of OPEC Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producing country, reportedly wants to curb output by at least 1.3 million barrels per day, or 1.3 percent of global production.
Saudi Arabia is hoping Russia, one of OPEC’s most important allies, cuts down its production by about 250,000 barrels per day, but Russia wants to limit its cut to half that amount.
OPEC delegates on Thursday said the group would make a planned cut in oil output conditional on the contribution from non-OPEC producer Russia.
Five OPEC delegates told Reuters news agency the group was waiting for news from Russia, as Energy Minister Alexander Novak had flown back from Vienna on Wednesday for a possible meeting with President Vladimir Putin.
Iran hopes to be exempted from the cuts to keep its economy afloat, as the country faces harsh economic sanctions imposed by the US.
“We must be excluded from any decision to cut production as long as illegal US sanctions are not lifted,” Iran’s Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said on Wednesday evening as he arrived in Vienna.
US and OPEC
The US, not a member of OPEC but a significant oil producer itself, has repeatedly called for oil prices to stay low, with Trump using Twitter several times to make the point.
In October, the oil price reached a four-year high of $86, but since then the price has dropped again to about $60 per barrel.
One issue that might complicate relations between the US and OPEC is the murder of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi by people linked to the government in Riyadh.
So far, Trump has supported Saudi Arabia’s version of the story, which exonerates Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of any involvement in the murder, despite US intelligence agencies allegedly telling Trump the prince was involved.
However, analysts at ING told AFP news agency that the US administration could possibly use the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi as leverage.
“While we believe that President Trump will be reluctant to escalate the situation, the Saudis are likely to choose the wording of any statement with regards to cuts very carefully,” ING told AFP.
Qatar leaves OPEC
The Vienna meeting also comes only days after Qatar announced it would be the first country from the Middle East to withdraw from OPEC, saying it wanted to focus more on gas production.
Qatar, which will leave on January 1, played only a small role in the organisation, providing just under two percent of OPEC’s total output.
The country wants to focus more on that natural resource, of which it’s currently already the world’s biggest exporter with about 30 percent of global production.
In September, Qatar announced it would increase its production of natural gas by adding a fourth production line, to raise capacity from the North Field to 110 million tonnes a year.
Qatar shares the world’s largest known natural gas field, the North Field, with Iran.
When the then-very-British Black Mirror was just starting to burst into America’s consciousness via Netflix in 2015, plenty of people didn’t like it. One critic who really hated the show went viral with a tweet that seemed to nail the M.O. of this high-tech scarefest. “Next on Black Mirror,” he wrote, “what if phones, but too much.”
Black Mirror writer and showrunner Charlie Brooker, a scathing TV critic himself, loved that snark so much he wrote the end of the episode “Playtest” specifically to fit it. (One of the reasons the anthology show has gone from strength to strength is Brooker likes to adopt what critics say and turn it up to 11: see also “San Junipero,” given a California-like setting to tweak Brits who said the show was going “too American.”)
But now, when you flick through the coffee table pages of a just-published oral history called Inside Black Mirror and reflect on the global phenomenon the show has become since then, what’s interesting is that snark hasn’t really aged well. Yes, this is the ultimate in cautionary TV for the smartphone age. But smartphones — and the incessant, insta-news and social media feeds we associate with them — actually feature in the show very sparingly. Only when the story needs them, in fact.
What if phones, but just the right amount.
With the help of some exclusive images from Inside Black Mirror, this is a guide to those moments when the show used fake online media to its most devastating effect. Here are the screens that are only seen for seconds, but successfully burrow into our brains like evil nightmare worms.
1. The National Anthem
With chilling realism, the fake Guardian announces the fake kidnapping of a fake princess.
Image: painting practice-house of tomorrow
The power of this 2011 story — better known as the one with the Prime Minister and the pig — relies on taking an absurd premise and turning it into queasy, revealing reality. And as we know all too well in 2018, nothing says queasy reality better than Twitter.
And so, five years before the age of Trump, Brooker gave us an inane Twitter mob of trolls influencing political decisions. The kidnapper of the Diana-like Princess Susannah has demanded that Prime Minister Michael Callow have sex with a pig on live TV. The tweets we see on screen for a brief moment, under the hashtag #PMPig, are as savage as you’d expect.
As Callow’s wife tells him, “it’s already happening in their heads.”
Image: painting practice-house of tomorrow
Brooker’s team went the extra mile to make the mob believable. Hashtags that seep into your subconscious when you watch the show include #trottergate and #snoutrage — the latter being used on real-life Twitter in 2015, when Prime Minister David Cameron was accused of having simulated intercourse with a pig’s head while a student.
A whole second page of results includes an Info Wars-esque user claiming the whole affair is a “false flag” and adding the hashtag “#bildeberg,” a conference of European and North American leaders and a frequent target of conspiracy theorists.
Image: painting practice-house of tomorrow
Everyone has a pet Black Mirror theory, and I was disappointed to see mine shot down in the book. I’d assumed the title of this episode was a reference to the “unpleasant tone” the government puts before the pig broadcast to discourage people from watching. Everyone watches anyway, so the tone is our true “national anthem,” right? Nope, it just turns out Charlie Brooker likes the Radiohead song of the same name.
2. Fifteen Million Merits
Image: netflix
There’s plenty of media-based nightmare fuel in this tale of a future where workers acquire “merits” by playing games and watching TV. Not least of which is its American Idol-like show-within-a-show, “Hot Shots.”
But worst of all is the innocuous dialog box that warns protagonist Bing (Daniel Kaluuya) that he will incur a penalty if he mutes the audio on an ad. In other words, he will lose merits unless his claustrophobic screen-filled box apartment is filled with the unblockable sounds of commercials, including one where the love of his life reluctantly stars in the porn show “WraithBabes.”
In a world where we’re already asked to watch ads to access content, it’s hard not to be sympathetic — and terrified about where the media and advertising industries are heading.
3. Be Right Back
Talking with the dead has come a long way since the Ouija board.
Image: netflix
Media interfaces don’t feature in “The Entire History of You,” an episode about the nasty side effects of rewatching one’s own memories. Twisted screens next show up in Season 2’s “Be Right Back,” where grieving Martha (Hayley Atwell) requests a copy of her late boyfriend Ash (Domhnall Gleeson).
The physical version doesn’t show up right away; an Ash copy first assembles itself online, based on his social media posts. Their first conversation passes the Turing test, and also manages to be creepy as hell.
4. The Waldo Moment
Too real, Black Mirror. Too real.
Image: channel 4/netflix
There is plenty to fear in the tale of a foul-mouthed TV cartoon character that finds electoral success by mocking establishment politicians. But the real gut punch doesn’t happen until the very last scene, where we fast forward into a fascist future.
Screens with inane slogans praising Waldo are set against a filthy inner city, where a homeless man is being tased by shadowy authorities in black helmets. Brooker wrote this episode in 2013, and in 2016 — with a fascist TV cartoon character about to win the presidency — declared that he was now terrified by his own prescience.
5. Nosedive
Every Instagram ever.
Image: house of tomorrow-zeppotron
Never mind “Playtest” — the ultimate “what if phones, but too much” episode is clearly the Season 3 opener, “Nosedive.” The way Lacie Pound (Bryce Dallas Howard) struggles to raise her rating from a so-so 4.2 is enough to make you swear off social media forever. (Especially given the fact that China is currently enacting a similar social reputation system: Brooker’s scary prescience strikes again!)
As so often in Black Mirror, the fake screens in “Nosedive” succeed by capturing the utter mundanity of most online interactions. Witness Lacie’s more highly-rated friend Naomi and her perfectly posed “weekend on the ocean” post, complete with comments ripped from every other Facebook post: “SOOOOooo Lucky Sis!” and “invite me next time buddy?”
Notably, none of the screens ever mention what service they’re supposed to be on. They don’t need to. We get it.
Image: house of tomorrow-zeppotron
When your (hopefully more enlightened) grandkids ask what life in the 2010s was like, this screenshot could serve as the ideal explainer. Just try to keep your sobbing to a minimum when you show them.
6. Hated in the Nation
Image: house of tomorrow-zeppotron-Netflix
This uneven murder-mystery episode is probably best summarized as “what if robot bees, but too much.” But at the same time, it returns to the “National Anthem” notion of a social media mob.
This time, the mob gathers around a far less sympathetic figure than the embattled PM: Jo Powers, a character modeled on smug racist British columnist Katie Hopkins. Powers may be a loathsome figure, but screens full of #DeathTo hashtags attached to her name remind us of times when a Twitter pile-on went too far — such as this ugly reaction in 2013 to PR person Justine Sacco’s idiotic tweet about AIDS in Africa.
Sacco’s story was prominently featured in Jon Ronson’s 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which in turn inspired “Hated in the Nation.” Sometimes Black Mirror is actually behind the times …
7. Arkangel
The iSpy, out soon.
Image: netflix
The window through which an overprotective mother spies on her daughter’s life looks like an app that Apple might design for the iPad.
The interface (courtesy of design studio and frequent Brooker client Painting Practice) is elegant and clean: a central “scroll wheel” hosts thumbnails of past videos you can zoom in on (from the inside out, the rings refer to hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades) while buttons down the side allow you to track your child’s location and bookmark favorite “moments.”
It’s all so simple and efficient, like a well-made photo app. You could almost forget this is parental Big Brother, made digital. What if Find My Friends (or “Stalk My Spouse,” as my wife and I call the always-on Apple location app), but too much?
8. Hang the DJ
The one ‘Black Mirror’ app we wish were real.
Image: house of tomorrow-zeppotron-netflix
And finally, it’s the episode that asks: What if Tinder, but perfect matches?
This time, for once, the real-life simplicity of the screens is seen as a positive. A prospective couple go on a date with a device that looks like a Nest, telling them how many hours they are allotted in their time together.
It turns out this pair are among thousands of digital simulations of a prospective couple in real life. They’re supposed to fight back against the limited-hour thing — because if they care enough to break the rules, it contributes to Future Tinder’s percentage chance that these two people are compatible. The sims are saving time and heartache in the real world — just like technology is supposed to do.
True, “Hang the DJ” raises troubling questions about the sentience of simulations. But it is also the most unambiguous happy ending in the Black Mirror canon (even more so than “San Junipero,” which left its lovers as mere simulations.)
Image: netflix
The episode leaves us with two uplifting messages: First, don’t just do what the screens tell you, because rebelling is romantic! Second, just do what this app tells you, because it helps predict romance and therefore you’ll be wasting less time on your screens!
Yep, those are kind of contradictory messages. But then again, that’s Black Mirror through and through. What if the dystopian future we fear, but really ambiguous?
At least three people have been killed following a car bombing attack in Iran’s southern port city of Chabahar, state television Press TV reported, quoting security officials.
Press TV quoted Mohammad Hadi Mar’ashi, security aide to the governor of Sistan and Balochestan province, as saying that a number of people have also been injured in the attack on Thursday.
Other reports say at least 19 people were also hurt, but Al Jazeera could not immediately verify the number of injuries.
Tasnim news agency reported that Chabahar’s police headquarters was targeted in the suicide attack.
Images posted online showed thick smoke rising from the sky in the area where the incident took place.
Chabahar Port, which is being developed with funding from India, has been described as India’s “golden gateway” that will help boost trade links to land-locked Afghanistan and central Asia, while bypassing its regional rival, Pakistan.
Carols don’t really go with much, except the holidays.
But surprisingly, the lyrics of Drake’s 2016 hit “Hotline Bling” seem to go pretty well with the melody of Christmas carol “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”
Twitter user Becca Rose posted a video of herself singing the mashup, which she said was discovered in a Tumblr post.
And hey, you know what, it really does go well together.
Recently I saw a post from tumblr user chlostars that noted “Hotline Bling” has the same syllables as the Christmas carol “Hark the Herald Angels sing.” I took this as a personal challenge. pic.twitter.com/wiht02pvt5
It’s all about the syllables, which at the right section of each song measures up perfectly.
Of course, this isn’t such a rare thing: Remember that guy who mashed up the tune of Adele’s “Hello,” as well as other popular songs, to the lyrics of “All Star” by Smash Mouth?
Allo, which launched back in 2016, will soon be no longer. The tech giant announced in a blog post that it’s ending support for the messaging app next March.
Google said users have largely switched to Android Messages, its default messaging app which integrates SMS, MMS, and Rich Communications Services (RCS).
The latter of which, RCS, represents the future of messaging, as SMS is set to become obsolete. Google is working hard on carrier support for RCS, so it comes up to par with Apple’s iMessages.
“Earlier this year we paused investment in Allo and brought some of its most-loved features—like Smart Reply, GIFs and desktop support—into Messages,” the blog post reads.
“Given Messages’ continued momentum, we’ve decided to stop supporting Allo to focus on Messages.”
If you’re using Allo, you can export your conversation history from the app until it closes down in March.
While Allo is on the way out, Google is keeping Duo, its video-calling app, which added video messaging recently. The company’s also continuing to develop Hangouts into a workplace collaboration app, helping it to rival the likes of Slack.