The Internet is Weird, & So is JK Rowling's Marketing Plan, & So is Gangnam Style

Yesterday Chris Randle's interview with Twitter user @FanFictionTXT went live on Hazlitt, which only further cemented my impression that the Internet is weird. For further evidence, consult this Gawker guide to Tumblr's nefarious subsect of human-on-the-outside-playfully-delusional-on-the-inside users, know colloquially as Otherkin.

And Mark Slutsky is curating a sampling of the best melancholic YouTube comments on his new blog, Sad YouTube, which is like a much more emotional version of the McSweeney's column, “Get to Know an Internet Commenter.”

Michael Chabon's racialized Oakland.

A selection of words that appear in Michiko Kakutani's review of JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy: gumption, limned, patricide, trundles, precariousness. Russell Smith on how Rowling's iron grip on the book's publicity alienates critics and readers.

I know you've probably already listened to Psy's Gangnam Style twice today, but have you considered the semiotic implications of the danceable meme? Or the subtle but deadly critique the video makes of South Korea's 1%?