Woman’s profile pic not fooling anyone

A woman was declared “obviously not attractive” today, after the internet came to a general consensus that her profile picture isn’t fooling anyone.

The black-and-white airbrushed image, which was carefully framed, lit and chosen out of four dozen other photos taken at around the same time, was uploaded yesterday evening to 26-year-old Megan Jenners’s Facebook profile – and all her friends agree that “this shit isn’t fooling anyone”.

“Yes, it’s a pretty photo. Yes, to the untrained eye that hasn’t seen her in real life, you might be fooled into thinking she’s attractive and then swiping right,” said the guy who follows her every update but hasn’t spoken to her in four years, Vuyo Rystic. “But let’s just admit the facts here: it’s a top-down, filter-heavy selfie that has clearly been put through the Instagram-photoshop wringer.”

Friends and followers of Jenners– even those on Twitter – have agreed.

“For me, my suspicions were raised when I saw the angle. I mean, it’s top-down and is filled with her face,” said one friend Jake Henderson shortly before liking it and commenting ‘omg so pretty u stuning babe’. “Why else would you want a full picture of your face as your profile picture unless you had a disgusting, corpulent and revoltingly grosteque mass underneath it that you wanted to hide no matter what?”

Others agree.

“No amount of BW correction and careful balancing of exposure and saturation can hide how much of a soulless, blackhearted skank Megan is,” said another friend, Erin Blakey, before hitting ‘like’. “I’ve read her statuses. She’s vapid and completely irritating and full of herself. Maybe I should post a passive-aggressive status about her?”

She followed this by adding “no, on second thoughts I shouldn’t” and “the two-faced bitch might realise who I was talking about.”

According to online researchers, much of the anger stems from its inherent insincere dishonesty.

“When it comes to Social Media, I think we can all agree that the most important, central tenet is honesty and truth,” said media analyst Eric Henderson. “So when she posted these quasi-blurry, pseudo-artistic selfies of herself and tried to pretend she was someone she wasn’t, she broke the cardinal rule of the internet: never lie to people.”

“In their eyes, this publication of a falsehood is a deep and hurtful mockery of the thought-provoking articles, provocative philosophical debates, and cat pictures they share,” he explained. “To the untrained eye, it might seem like all these people commenting on the picture think she is, quote, ‘gorjuz’ and ‘totes hawt girl’, but we all tacitly know what they’re really saying.”

However, not everyone agrees.

“Oh, I dunno, bro,” said one man. “I mean, I would still definitely bang her.”

New App revolutionises how we remember Huge Life Events

Life-changing experiences will never be the same again, thanks to a new App that is making huge waves in social media circles.

Insta-Mem, which has been downloaded 6 million times since it hit the App Store this weekend, automatically takes your boring, unspecial photos and diary entries from incredible experiences and journeys and converts them into a more representative and social-media friendly format.

“Times have changed, and with ever-ubiquitous modern technologies in our increasingly digitalised world, it’s about time we updated and modernised the way we remember the special moments in our life,” said creator of the application, Ian Staygram. “Let’s say I went to Naples and lay on the warm white shores of the Mediterranean, gently out my slowly-bronzing legs out on the beautiful soft sands just meters from the warm waters and taking in the simple pleasures of life in a moment that hope will stay with me until I die - how am I supposed to remember that without multiple selfies, social media check-in posts and filter-heavy shots of the local cuisine?”

Thousands have agreed.

“What, really, is the holiday of a lifetime if it isn’t posted online for your friends to like and comment on? And if you do take photos of the mountains or scenery, how am I supposed to know that I, or anyone who was apparently there, was *actually* there?” asked internet user and fervent Mem-er Jake Henderson. “I think we can all agree that, whether you’re diving in the Pacific Ocean with Whalesharks and Sunfish, or sitting on Mount Everest watching the sun rise over the distant smoky hills like a magnificent orb made from burning gold, the most important thing is that everyone you know knows that you – you, with your face, maybe your mouth curled into a cheesy grin with an accompanying peace sign or thumbs-up – were there. Everything else is meaningless.”

Social-media users no longer need to fear forgetting these magical moments, says Staygram.

“The app is so simple to use, that even a Twitter user wouldn’t struggle. All you do is take a photo of yourself, and our Smartscan technology will do the rest. All those yawn-provoking shots of the scenery and panoramic views of the island snoozefest you were staying in will now be updated to have you in them, even if you didn’t take any selfies on the trip,” he said. “Hell, if you didn’t even take pics at the place, the app just searches Google for sunsets and snaps in that area and edits those into your album. It’s not like anyone will be able to tell the difference between sunsets or check that you actually took the pictures.”

The app also automatically adds a relevant filter and hashtags.

“When I visit memorable locations, I don’t want to have have the stress of taking periodic selfies that reaffirm that I do actually exist and am actually in Paris,” said another user Mary Marie. “I don’t want to bother with the profound hassle of picking between ten slightly different pre-set image filters, or the philosophical wrestling match of coming up with seventeen hashtags that adequately sum up the profound, life-altering trip I’ve taken. With Insta-Mem , never again will I forget that I travelled and visited the Top Ten places in Paris that I read about in a listicle."

Already, many thousands are wishing they had had this app when they travelled the globe to broaden their understanding of the myriad different cultures and peoples of our beautiful, rich planet.

“Nowadays I just sit in my chair trying to work out what I did between the years of 1968 and 2010,” said senior citizen Jerry Attrick. “We didn’t have Twitter or Facebook back then, so how were we supposed to remember those moments that changed us deeply and profoundly for the rest of our lives?”

Staygram now says they have their eyes set on video format technologies.

“Let’s say you go to a concert and forgot to record the entire thing from eighty-seven seats back in the cheap section on your 2.8 megapixel cameraphone. Well, with the app we’re developing, we’ll just take DVD-quality official footage and convert it to be smaller, blurrier, and filled with uncompressed, low-quality sound complete with barely audible songs being drowned out by the cheering and screaming. Imagine you’re bobbing for apples in a tub of Vaseline after corneal damage.”

Photos: Everest by Luca Galuzzi; Great Wall of China by Severin.stalder. Both Creative Commons.

7 of the most offensive, disgusting images ever published on the internet (that we have the decency, ethical values and common sense not to republish or share)

The internet – and indeed the world – is a disgusting, horrifying place.

Every day, everywhere, there are acts that are being carried out that are so contrary to common decency and humanity that if you knew about them you would buy a gun and climb a clock tower: acts so heinous that they go against the very idea of what it is to be a living, thinking human on this earth; acts so utterly unspeakable that, if there were images of them out there, would make the whole internet-going audience click them and link them and share them again and again and make for incredible web traffic and advertising revenue.

But unlike most websites, we’re better than that.

And so here they are. The seven most horrifying, disgusting, vomit-inducing and shocking pictures you’ll ever not see on the internet, all curated on one website.

1. This book
   

   Throughout history there have been books and literature that have touched a little too roughly on the protruding jagged and sensitive bone jutting out the broken leg of contemporary society. And thus, many, many books have been banned.

   None like this, however. Christ, the hatred in the passage above (which we’ve edited to save you endless consternation and fury) alone is just shocking. Racism. Sexism. Arguing in favour of eugenics. “But Muse and Abuse,” I hear you argue, “wouldn’t showing us this image sate our morbid curiosity AND garner you tonnes of pageviews and money? Isn’t it win-win?”. Well, yes. But we like to think that we’re better than stooping to such lows just to make the number in the top-right-hand corner of this blog a little bigger.

2. Animal abuse and cruelty
   

   Vivisection. Animal cruelty. Abuse. Sadism. Just these words are enough to make you vomit out the murdered cow or mass-slaughtered poultry you had for lunch. This picture, however, would make you outright rage and do everything in your power to repost and share your outrage online to all your friends. You know, stuff that will really change the world and end these horrific practices that you despise so much. And so, we’ve taken out everything that will purposefully offend you just because we believe that getting a few more readers than last month is simply not as important as protecting society from unnecessary depictions of senseless cruelty.

   If it helps, imagine that this image has a picture of an adorable kitten smiling innocently in a shoe three times bigger than it instead of a cow whose neck has been slit open, its helpless, tied-up hooves scraping a desperate, futile final few mad jerks as its vital fluids pool in a shallow crimson pool under its lolling tongue and insane, terrified bulging eyeballs.

3. This racist, bigoted post on Facebook
   

   We all have that friend on Facebook who defends blackface or posts News24 articles saying why black people are stupid and lesser beings. But god, this post (which we won’t share because controversy breeds controversy and doing this won’t challenge the status quo but only provide a wider audience to this person to disseminate their hateful, backward views) just takes the cake. The eugenics-supporting, supremacist, Vanilla-only-no-chocolate-allowed cake. It makes Steve Hofmeyr look like Martin Luther King for godssakes. Why would we want to share that?

   Sometimes it’s better to use our silence to doom something to die in its own stupidity and obscolecence than create a domino effect of controversy just because we want to show off how progressive and outraged we are.

4. This tweet
   

   This tweet – which links directly to an ISIS beheading video – will end your faith in humanity. That’s why – unlike CNN, the BBC or any other major news network which technically acts as an intermediary for scary terrorist training videos and PR campaigns – we have blacked it out. We know fear sells, but seeing how we don’t want to make money off people’s fear and how, because this blog has no advertising revenue activated, we actually cannot make money off your endless fear, we just won’t. We like to think we’re progressive like that.

5. This picture
   

   Honestly, this image was so unspeakably disgusting that we won’t even edit out specific parts of it. Maybe it’s child abuse. Maybe it’s sexual slavery. Whatever it is, there isn’t a need for ad-revenue-and-pageview-hungry sites like this to make these sorts of things widely accessible to a large internet-faring audience. But hey, what better way to raise awareness to stop these sick acts than to keep spreading the content they produce and gloat about on social media, right?

6. This, god help us all.
   

   This. You can't guess what’s going on in this picture (just the way it should be), but Jesus, if you had finer details, you’d want to kill yourself. Imagine the worst thing you can, and then multiply that by Satan to the power of Ebola times infinity times Justin Bieber. Whatever this image was before we tastefully redacted it, it’s simply better that you don’t live your life in constant, ceaseless terror of leaving your house.

7. This disgusting sexual act
   

   For god’s sakes, people, there might be be children out there seeing every post that you accidentally have defaulted to “public”. We would hate for these images to fall into young, innocent hands. At the most, we’re stopping accidental exposure of graphic images to blissful juvenile minds unaware of such horrors. Although, we might still make kids get a sexual fetish for shadows or silhouette porn.

   Our bad.

Pics courtesy of Photoshop God and resident editor of photography Matthew de Klerk

Obama Robben Island pics voted “most exciting of all fucking time”

Image by JIM WATSON / Getty Images.
From BuzzFeed.com
zOMG A DOOR

In a first for South African history, 100% of the South African population reached a unanimous consensus on something this morning. Their point of agreement wasn’t racial politics or corruption, but rather the pictures taken of Obama’s visit to Nelson Mandela’s place of incarceration. 

According to consensus, the pictures are “the most exciting, impressive, totally not cliché attempt in the history of overly choreographed photo eds to make the US President seem sincere and human in the light of recent surveillance and drone attack controversies.”

The pictures feature such memorable, life-changing, iconic and thought-provoking images such as Obama shot from a distance, walking through a collection of hallways and doorways that could totally not be mistaken for just any arbitrary place in the world.

“I loved the part where he walked through a doorway. It had me in tears,” said local Limpopo resident John Mxamba.

The pictures, which first feature the man himself walking alone in the hallways of the most famous prison in the world that isn’t Guantanamo, quickly move on to show his wife in the picture, lending it an air of “overwhelming emotion and vulnerability”.

Photographic award committees have singled out the most powerful photo of the series, Obama staring out a window.

Image by Carolyn Kaster / AP
From BuzzFeed.com

 “The framing and composition of the photo just goes to underline the kinds of cutting edge photography that is being produced by the diverse collection of independent media institutions across the world REUTERS” said iPhone owner, Instagram user and Chief Photo Editor at the Sunday Times Sipia Tone.

Famous South African photographers could not be reached for comment, because they were too busy being unemployed, retrenched and replaced by new, super-artisitic iPhone wielding photojournalists. 

President Obama is also allegedly being put forward as a nominee for “Most Ridiculously Perfect Handwriting Currently In Practice on Earth”.

Image by JASON REED / Reuters
From BuzzFeed.com

 Those wishing to feel their heartstrings tugged by this powerful and iconic and not at all shite photographic expose see the full images at http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/16-moving-images-from-president-obamas-visit-to-the-prison-n