Category Archives: Blog

Love it or hate it so, so much, the Roseanne reboot got a second season.

After a massive ratings premiere on Tuesday, ABC announced Friday that they would be renewing the controversial sitcom for its second season. 

The internet was torn up, for better or worse.

Though critics had been talking about the show for weeks, the show’s ratings shocked even the most hardened skeptics. On Tuesday night, a staggering 18.2 million viewers tuned in. The total viewercast has grown by over 3.4 million in recent days.

The announcement comes on the heels of news that President Trump called Roseanne, a Trump supporter, himself to congratulate her on the show’s ratings success. Read more…

More about Watercooler, Roseanne Barr, Roseanne, Entertainment, and Movies Tv Shows

One cannot simply sing the blues. You need to FEEL the blues. The blues are an emotion, a journey, a spiritual unraveling of someone’s innermost suffering.

This dog. This dog has seen some shit. 

While, sure, we’ve seen other dogs howl along as their owners play music, this dog has an uncanny ability to “sing” perfectly in pitch, with a rhythm and soul that encompasses the genre. 

[h/t:Reddit] Read more…

More about Funny, Dog, Culture, and Animals

Everything was fine until somebody touched the shrimp fried rice.

The communal office fridge is one of the most contentious areas of any office. Long lost leftovers go forgotten until it’s hard for anyone to avoid the stench, unorganized stackers become apparent, and  inevitably, someone’s precious food or condiment will be violated. There are a few unspoken fridge rules for any office, however, the golden rule is to never, ever eat or discard someone’s lunch. Ever. 

Comedian Zak Toscani shared a controversial tale of an office lunch gone wrong, which he says started Thursday evening after his coworker noticed their lunch had gone missing from the fridge. We were unable to confirm the events actually took place (this may be a big joke … he’s a comedian after all), but the story is so good, it must be read. Read more…

More about Funny, Lunch, Culture, and Web Culture

My iPhone isn’t even two years old, and it’s already dying.

That’s the upshot of Apple’s new “Battery Health” feature, introduced in iOS 11.3 Thursday. Though the device assures me it’s operating at “peak performance,” it also indicates that the battery can only hold 93 percent of the charge it once did.

So it goes. Every battery degrades over time, and there’s not a lot Apple can do about that. In fact, this new feature is a step in the right direction: it’s a sort of mea culpa after the tech giant was caught slowing down old devices without user consent, supposedly to combat unexpected shutdowns. The more information users have to counteract — or at least anticipate — the negative effects of iPhone aging, the better. Read more…

More about Apple, Iphone, Tech, Big Tech Companies, and Iphone

From the Book of Sister Jean, Chapter 1, Verse 3: “God is probably a basketball fan, more of the NCAA than the NBA.”

The word is truth, especially when it’s spoken by Loyola-Chicago’s Sister Jean Dolores-Schmidt, the school’s basketball team’s chaplain. On Friday, the internet celebrity and 98-year-old nun gave her own press conference ahead of the Ramblers’ game on Saturday night, delivering one gem after another.

Asked if God was a basketball fan, Sister Jean had this to say:

“He probably is. And he’s probably a basketball fan more of the NCAA than the NBA.” Read more…

More about Watercooler, Ncaa, March Madness, Ncaa Basketball, and Sister Jean

While it’s fun to explore the world by zooming around on Google Earth, there’s just something uninspiring about most satellite images. While the earth is 100 percent most definitely round, many of these images are taken straight down, making the world appear flat, and, well, kinda boring. 

However, when an image captured by a satellite is taken at an angle, the perspective changes. Photos of landscapes and structures no longer look like two-dimensional maps. 

Planet Labs, Increcently released a collection of these stunning images, which show the wonder and beauty of Earth in a perspective unlike the satellite imagery we’ve become accustomed to. From the bustling skyline of Shanghai to the the world’s tallest waterfall, experience the world around you like never before. Read more…

More about Space, Nature, Satellite, Culture, and Space

The first time I read A Wrinkle In Time as a kid, I remember being utterly terrified.

Beginning with the iconic opening line “It was a dark and stormy night,” Madeleine L’Engle’s classic children’s sci-fi tale takes us on a harrowing journey with iron-willed Meg Wallace, precocious Charles Wallace, and charming Calvin as they they bend time and space to find Meg and Charles’s missing father.

It wasn’t until I re-read the book as an adult that I figured out why: As a kid, I was used to stories about kids persevering and fighting the challenges to discover the moral of being themselves. I wasn’t used to reading stories where the youthful protagonists face such grave mortal and existential peril.  Read more…

More about Mashreads, Mashreads Podcast, A Wrinkle In Time, Culture, and Books

Jim Carrey, actor, comedian and Renaissance painter, just submitted his first masterpiece.

Or, uh, so the people of the internet think. On Thursday, Jim Carrey submitted his “official portrait” of Donald Trump to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery via Twitter. The portrait features Trump sitting in his bathrobe eating an ice cream cone which is highly accurate, so he obviously has my vote.

“Dear Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery,” Carrey wrote on Twitter. “I know it’s early but I’d like to submit this as the official portrait of our 45th President, Donald J. Trump. It’s called, ‘You Scream. I Scream. Will We Ever Stop Screaming?” Read more…

More about Watercooler, Smithsonian, Trump, Jim Carrey, and Jim Carrey Painting

It ain’t an iPhone, but a new Android Go device will get you online for $80.

The ZTE Tempo Go phone just launched in the United States, delivering a pared down version of Google’s mobile operating system at a low price. It has a 5-inch screen, some pretty weak cameras, and — yes! — a headphone jack.

Let’s also reiterate: It costs $80.

Of course, the phone isn’t meant to be powerful. It runs Oreo Go, a version of Android for “entry-level” phones. And Google does mean entry-level. Inexpensive Android Go devices are intended to help the absurdly powerful tech corporation make inroads in growing markets like India, where just over 22 percent of the population used smartphones last year compared to 69 percent in the United States, according to one analysis. (Note that surveys from Pew indicate that 77 percent of Americans now own smartphones; there’s a bit of wiggle room to these statistics.)  Read more…

More about Google, Android, Zte, Tech, and Smartphones

It’s been a pretty strange year for politics. It’s even stranger now that major political figures are crowdfunding their legal fees. 

A GoFundMe stetup by “Friends of Andrew McCabe” launched Thursday to pay for the former FBI deputy director’s legal defense fund. 

McCabe’s GoFundMe is not only trending, it’s also raised a tremendous amount of money in the past few hours. As of the time of writing, it had raised $252,892 in just six short hours. People have been donating so quickly that the campaign increased its goal to $250,000 after it met its original $150,000 goal in less than four hours.  Read more…

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