A little Sunday afternoon opinion piece – interested to hear your thoughts… Social media’s a party right? It’s fast, fun and free and everyone’s invited. It can even shift power from the traditional heavyweight to the little guy. But are we sleepwalking towards a day when shunning Facebook and just saying no to Twitter is deemed socially irresponsible? Could being a social media refusenik make you invisible to society and ultimately render
How would you describe yourself in a personal ad? So few words to sum up your whole life. You’d think that most people would go all out to sell themselves. Are these people too modest and undemanding to even sell themselves in a personal ad? Check out their ads from a local paper below. ‘Bob, 58, drives, seeks special female of similar age for relationship’ ‘ Jim, 50 likes nights
Patrick Dalton loves London, especially the shit parts. Seven years ago he started the website Shit London as a response to Secret London which featured photographs of sunsets at Tower Bridge and pictures of Beefeaters. As he pointed out, he lived in London and Beefeaters didn’t feature hugely in his life. Most of the photos are sent in by readers and he selects the best for publication. His captions are
Vitaly Raskalov and Alexander Remnov call themselves skywalkers. Skywalking, which consists of scaling structures without safety equipment and then uploading the pictures to social media sites, appears to have originated in Russia and has gained popularity over the last year. Some of the highest buildings in Moscow and some other cities in Russia feature including the top of the Russian Academy of Sciences (where the boys are doing the plank) or a turret
At 32 Jeremiah McDonald filmed this conversation with his 12 year old self. Does make you ask yourself what you were doing at 12 years old. Were you already planning a film career like Jeremiah?
‘Not every craft project looks like Martha made it’ are the wise words on the CraftFail site. Quick to spot that Pinterest and other craft sites were begging to be satirised CraftFail along with Pinstrosity and Pintester do just that. Pintester’s strapline is ‘fucking up pinterest pins so you don’t have to’. Despite their apparent lack of crafting skills some of the publishers seem to be actual crafters. CraftFail was started
The brilliant photoshoppers at Worth1000 have been skilfully morphing Hollywood’s hottest male stars into these hilarious, slightly weary looking, lady versions of themselves. Be careful though, you’ll laugh but you may find a long held crush is killed stone dead…
Utterly beguiling and very funny short film by David Shrigley for Pringle. He doesn’t really have a one eyed alcoholic son called Gerald does he? Until January, you can see new and recent work by David Shrigley at the Cornerhouse in Manchester in an exhibition featuring drawings, paintings, sculpture and never-seen-before live performance. Shrigley’s new book How Are You Feeling? has also just been published by Canongate.
The great John Hegley will be reading from his new collection Peace, Love and Potatoes this evening at the Scottish Poetry Library in Crichton’s Close Edinburgh. Tickets are £7. Hegley has long been a favourite with us at Avocado Sweet and this latest collection has all the whip smart-yet-vulnerable, simple-but-meaningful charm of his previous work: An Alien Address Do you have bendy buses or are you jet propelled? Do you
Head over to a Facebook page called Dirty Old 1970s New York City for a shot – possibly from a dirty needle – of grimy, pre gentrification New York. The page is styled for ‘those who loved NYC before the 1980s took its balls away’. It’s easy to forget that before Woody Allen got us thinking the city was a book-lined psychiatrist’s study with a movie theatre on every corner, Nora Ephron