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.”

Facebook introduces new revolutionary new features

Social media users should brace themselves for a whole Facebook experience filled chock-a-block with features set to revolutionise the way you live in the online world.

“We’re changing everything,” said head of the R&D team at Facebook, Cody Compyler, “and not just the colour and logo font.”

“Facebook forces users to go through their entire lives, photos, opinions, thoughts and personality, and choose only a tiny fraction of a percentage of what is true to impress the people around you,” he said, “but most of us got Facebook when we were 16-year-old morons who thought liking a page called ‘Beer and Cigarettes’ made us look like rebellious bad boys. How can you pretend to be cool on Facebook if there’s over three years of evidence to the contrary that you can’t delete for fear of making it look like you joined Facebook this year, like your grandmother?”

This issue, says Compyler, is expounded only by its corollary.

“Then, when your mother or grandmother or someone close to you goes on Facebook, they judge you or start worrying because the only photos of you are taken at parties or trance festivals, making them say they’re worried about your ‘drinking problem’ when actually you’re not even that much of a lady-slaying party animal.”

In light of this, they’re introducing two new features: the ‘Real User feature, and the ‘Make Me Cool’ feature.

“Let’s see these features in action. If we go to my friend Jake’s profile, we can see he has photos of himself in the gym, at the beach with his really hot girlfriend, and driving around in his badass car. All of this makes me feel pretty inadequate. So if I press the ‘Show Me The Real Jake’ button over here, Facebook immediately shows me pictures of his girlfriend in a Onesie without makeup on, and here it gives us some really embarrassing childhood pictures, and here we have a collection of desperate and awkward messages to his grandmother and his ex-girlfriend who he apparently still loves to death. This is great, because now I know that Jake isn’t as cool as he seems, and also that my life isn’t that shit in comparison.”

“Now, if I go to my own profile, we can see that I have over 2943 photos and six years of likes, comments, posts and shares. I can’t possibly go through all of this and sweep all the embarrassing stuff under the carpet – that would take hours. So I just click the ‘Make Me Cool’ button and voilà! Thanks to Facebook’s coolness algorithm, I no longer liked ‘Beer’ and ‘Fast Cars’ and ‘The Hangover’ when I was 16, but instead I liked ‘The works of Noam Chomsky’ and ‘Psychodynamic analysis of postmodern literature’.”

The R&D team now report that they are working on a feature that will half the time it takes to ignore, trivialise or mock people on your newsfeed.

“It used to take as much as an entire hour to entirely debase someone’s existence and being, but we’ve cut down that time to as little as sixty seconds,” they said. “Hell, the only thing it doesn’t do for you is groan, roll your eyes and moan ‘how fucking retarded are some people?’”

Facebook users concerned over Giraffe takeover

pic: wikimedia commons

Hundreds of Facebook users reportedly clogged up the Facebook Team’s complaints and queries service inbox this morning, after unanimously voicing concerns over the sudden and inexplicable increase in the number of giraffes on Facebook.

“I opened up my newsfeed this morning, and suddenly I saw that all my human friends had suddenly become giraffes,” said 23-year-old Rhodes student and hater of stupid fucking reposted riddles about what you would open first if your parents came over to your house at 3am, Derrick Anderson. “What is this bullshit?”

The complaints threw the Facebook investigative team into immediate action. However, the scale of the mystery has left them stumped and dazed.

“Right now, we just don’t know why this is happening,” said Head of Complaints Resolution for Facebook Ree Pears. “It could be Black Magick, transamorgraphying them into animals by way of voodoo and the dark arts. Or it could be a sophisticated hack. It might even be some sort of transcendant expression of our users' inner animal, the power of forgotten gods and ancestors making themselves known in the most public way possible.”

He went on to add, however, that it definitely couldn’t be because of a stupid riddle.

“Correlation isn’t the same as causality,” said Pears. “We’re fairly confident that our users aren’t so mindless that they would A) fall for such a daft word puzzle and B) actually go through with changing their profile picture after failing this incredible flawed and at the same time very easy challenge.”

Meanwhile, professors studying language at Universities across the world have expressed their outrage at the events.

“We’re concerned that there will be a giraffe monopoly on Facebook,” said the Rhodes University Dean of Students Div ke Vlerk in a statement this morning. “At Rhodes, we’re total supporters of an animal multiplicity, and as such we advise students to please upload pictures of goats, lions, carnivores, scavengers  diurnal and nocturnal animals, be they mammal or reptile or aquatic, in the interest of equal representation and diversity.”

Meanwhile, professors from the English departments of various tertiary institutes have complained at the riddle.

“It’s just too flawed to consider. I mean, why the hell would your parents be coming over at 3am?” said Dean of Humanities Jay Entprix. “The only reason anyone would feasibly suggest that sort of eventuality would be an in the event of an emergency of some kind, in which case why would you offer them wine or jam or cheese? And what kind of fucking cheese comes in a bottle or jar? They’re your parents, so presumably you wouldn’t offer them the cheap squeezey-cheese? And of course, if you wake up first the answer is ‘Your Eyes’, but what if you’re lying in bed comprehending the simple meaninglessness of the entire universe as outlined in theories of existentialism or nihilism? In that case, your eyes are already open and you’ll open the door first – unless they had their own key, or you live in a house with no doors or an open-plan vista that limits private enclosure.”

He shook his head before breaking off and adding that you could probably see his point so he wouldn’t bore you any further.

“Also, what if you’re not home?” he said. “None of these potential factors are even suggested at in this over-simplistic riddle.”

In spite of all this the Facebook Team is adamant that they will get to the bottom of this.

“Right now we’re programming and ‘Automatic Friend Spring-clean’ function to Facebook that will use your webcam and microphone to track your sarcastic eye-rolls and groans of ‘fuck, come on,’ or ‘god, I hate you’ and so on and so forth,” said Pear. “Currently we’re automatically adding anyone with a Giraffe in their profile picture to that list. One click, and you’ll never have to read that shit again.”

The group of Facebook experts has already made  a page outlining these plans – a page that has garnered over 700 million likes since its creation.

“We’re sure this is a feature everyone will love,” said Pears. “Except, of course, that bastard Reggie at Toys ‘R Us.”