Author Archives: Carol Edwards

This year Mashable is celebrating the season of love with Horny on Main, an exploration of the many ways that thirsting for sex affects our lives.  

If we hear the word “horny” one more time…

We don’t know about you, reader, but we get tired of saying the word horny. No, not tired of being horny. We’re just tired of using the same term over and over again. There’s gotta be more than just “horny.”

Luckily, there are at least 69 other ways to get the same message across. We compiled a list, including slang you may or may not have heard before, GIFs, emoji, and even a few options from the dictionary (because nothing sets the mood like saying “Oh baby, I’m so libidinous.”). Take a look and choose the one that feels right for the moment.  Read more…

More about Slang, 69, Horny, Culture, and Sex Relationships

In our Love App-tually series, Mashable shines a light into the foggy world of online dating. It is cuffing season after all.

It’s almost become unusual for people to not meet their partner online. That wasn’t always the case. 

Twenty-nine percent of heterosexual and 65 percent of same-sex couples meet online. Over 20 billion matches have been made since Tinder launched in 2012.

But when Match.com, one of the first mainstream dating sites, was founded in 1993, it was taboo to talk about online dating. And that stigma, which we’ve since shorn as a dating public, lasted for years. 

We took a trip through time and spoke to couples who met on Match roughly two decades ago. They opened up about the stigma, their love stories, and challenges they had to overcome. Here are their stories.  Read more…

More about Relationships, Online Dating, Marriage, Marriages, and Love App Tually

Warning: Contains spoilers for Bojack Horseman‘s final season.

Bojack Horseman is a show that goes all in on the details.

Each frame is packed full of so many tiny in-jokes and background puns that it feels like you could watch the entire series several times over, and still keep seeing things you missed.

The Season 6 whiteboard sequence is the perfect example of this. 

To recap, in Season 6, Episode 11, Diane, Todd, and Princess Carolyn attempt to work out why Bojack is being investigated by two reporters. Their method? Writing down every bad thing he’s done on a huge whiteboard.

More about Bojack Horseman, Bojack Horseman Season 6, Entertainment, and Movies Tv Shows

It’s Valentine’s Day and Jack Dorsey is tweeting about wine. 

Or, more precisely, he tweeted a screenshot of a WikiHow article telling people how to properly hold a wine glass. Whatever you do, insists the article with an accompanying picture of a solitary hand holding a glass of wine, “Never hold the bowl.” It’s real depressing shit. 

The Twitter CEO shared the image late Friday afternoon after, we’re assuming, his date told him to stop being such a pretentious jerk and just enjoy the nice bottle of Priorat for crying out loud. 

More about Twitter, Jack Dorsey, Wine, Tech, and Big Tech Companies

Smart speakers are creepy recording devices that eavesdrop on unsuspecting people. A new piece of custom technology offers the chance to fight back. 

Stylized as a cyberpunk bracelet, a “wearable jammer” was developed by a trio of professors at the University of Chicago. In addition to looking punk rock as all hell, the device emits ultrasonic noise that interferes with microphones’ ability to record yet is inaudible to humans. 

Oh, and the professors — Ben Zhao, Heather Zheng, and assistant professor Pedro Lopes — published schematics online so the more technically proficient of you can make one at home.  Read more…

More about Privacy, Smart Speakers, Tech, and Other

HQ Trivia, the live trivia gameshow app created by two of Vine’s cofounders, is shutting down less than three years after launching. 

The abrupt shutdown, which was first reported by CNN, was announced Friday after a planned acquisition fell through, HQ Trivia CEO Rus Yusupov told employees. 

“With HQ we showed the world the future of TV,” Yusupov said in a tweet. “We didn’t get to where we hoped but we did stretch the world’s imagination for what’s possible on our smartphones. Thanks to everyone who helped build this and thanks for playing.”

More about Tech, Consumer Tech, Hq Trivia, Tech, and Consumer Tech

Saying “I love you” can be hard. But sending a heart emoji? No problemo!

On Valentine’s Day, heart emoji have their work cut out for them as our emotionally burdened fingers send pictographs of love ’round the globe. 

Not all of these emoji staples are created equal, though. According to Emojipedia’s Jeremy Burge, the red heart was Emojipedia’s most searched emoji on Valentine’s Day. At any given time on V-Day, the red heart emoji was looked up twice as much as all the other hearts. People are suckers for a classic! 

More about Emoji, Valentine S Day, Love, Emojis, and Tech

I love dumb stuff: corgis with long legs, cheese that looks like people, my idiot boyfriend (hi, honey!) In Table Manners, dumb stuff abounds. For a gamer like me, that is a match made in heaven.

The “physics-based dating simulator,” available on PC this Valentine’s Day, tasks players with helping a disembodied hand impress a dinner date. How did this hand come to be severed? I don’t know. Can the hand even eat dinner? No clue. Why is this charmer still single? You tell me! 

The game opens on a desk that doubles as your mission control center and tutorial level in what looks like a college dorm room. Taking a break from his studies and other undisclosed hand business, Mr. Hand swipes away on an app called Blundr. Read more…

More about Steam, Simulator, Dating Sim, Table Manners Game, and Entertainment

The price of .com domains could be about to go up and you can thank President Donald Trump.

Thanks to a new contract, Verisign can now jack up prices on .com domains — and companies could pass those higher costs onto consumers. 

First, here are the organizations you need to know about. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a not-for-profit corporation that has authority over the internet’s domain name system. The registry, Verisign, manages all .com domains on the web, and sells them wholesale to registrars like Namecheap and GoDaddy, which sell them to individuals and organizations. Read more…

More about Donald Trump, Domains, Icann, Domain Names, and Tech

On Thursday, researchers at MIT published an injurious study about vulnerabilities in a “blockchain-based” voting app called Voatz. They found that malicious attackers could penetrate the app and then view, disrupt transmission, or even alter voters’ choices. 

Despite the niche nature of the app (it’s geared towards overseas and disabled voters) and the technicality of the study, the New York Times picked up the news; the integrity of electronic voting is on everyone’s mind in the wake of the disastrously botched use of a voting app in the Iowa caucus. 

Broadcasting the troubling findings in the Times has prompted public criticism of the app across the internet, and worry by public officials of its use in elections: One county that was planning to use the app has already decided against doing so in the wake of the report. Read more…

More about Elections, Voting, Tech, Politics, and Cybersecurity