internet explorers club | finally, the reversed-hand-with-middle-finger-extended emoji is here

FIRST THINGS FIRST: the Official Mad Men Auction starts TOMORROW. You can purchase things like Don's bottle of Smirnoff, Peggy's ad for a roommate, SC&P mugs, and more! Please note that I will accept all of these things as gifts.

In History of Watermelon, a pretty neat insight into how watermelons looked in the 17th century, thanks to a Renaissance painting. In terms of selective breeding, I point you towards Hogarth's paintings of pugs to see how much they've changed.

Some amazing combinations of two of my loves, internet and language. The debate about whether to capitalize the word "internet" rages amongst scholars, and is actually fascinating. We don't capitalize cable or telephone, but internet is so often used as "the Internet," so it almost seems a proper noun. Microsoft is the first platform to support "reversed-hand-with-middle-finger-extended" emoji, so you can properly shame other platforms into including it. The first use of the word "email" might be lost forever (but folks are still hunting it down)

In terms of emoji reactions, my current status is frowning-face-with-open-mouth while reading this article on a Vine star trying to make it more broadly. One key takeaway is that a bunch of Vine stars live in an apartment ON VINE STREET, but in all seriousness, it's a fascinating and compelling (if a bit 😦) look inside a world that I had only peripherally known about.

Someone is doing the Lord's work by fact-checking those HistoryInPics / ScienceIsGreat twitter bots.

I just found out about the Corrupted Blood Incident a few days ago, which is when a bug in World of Warcraft led to entire cities being wiped out from a pandemic (this is less an issue in WoW, because you can just resurrect, but it is pretty darn annoying).

During the epidemic, normal gameplay was disrupted. Player responses varied but resembled real-world behaviors. Some characters with healing abilities volunteered their services, some lower-level characters who could not help would direct people away from infected areas, some characters would flee to uninfected areas, and some characters attempted to spread the disease to others. Players in the game reacted to the disease as if there was real risk to their well-being.

Today, apparently, it's used as a case study in how diseases will impact large populations. Who knew?

Etcetera: A dystopic version (?!) of Little Women is coming to TV. NASA's 404 page is my new favorite. What’s it like to be a top Magic: The Gathering player?

—Emily