Westworld Rickroll’d Us: In anticipation of Season 2 (debuting this Sunday!) Westworld creators teased they would reveal the entire plot of the new season if a post on Reddit got 1,000 upvotes. Of course, the post reached that goal within hours – and fans were rewarding with a 25-minute video titled “Westworld Season 2 — A Primer,” which was the most elaborate Rickroll ever. Amazing. Can’t wait for Sunday! (LINK)

Use Google to ‘Talk’ to Books’: Google’s new Talk to Books tool gives conversational answers for questions but with citations from real books. For example, if you search “What was Prince’s band’s name?” and it delivers not just the answer but links to full digital version of books with the answer highlighted. Pretty amazing use of technology and a glimpse into the future of libraries. (LINK)

Amazon and Reddit Exploding: This week we learned Amazon has exceeded 100 million paid Prime subscribers! CEO Jeff Bezos said in 2017 Amazon shipped more than 5 billion items with Prime worldwide. It also came out the active number of Reddit users is as large as Twitter! It’s a more than 30 percent increase in less than six months, marking Reddit as the sixth most-visited website in the world. Oh, and visitors spend longer on Reddit.com than any other site in the Top 50, regardless of category – even compared to top ‘adult’ sites. According to TheNextWeb, Reddit can credibly claim that it’s even more engaging than porn. Luckily it’s mostly SFW. Well mostly. (LINK)

Dejarik IRL: You know the famous “holochess” hologram strategy game in all the Star Wars movies – where players direct a collection of holographic alien characters to battle each other for dominance? Thanks to the new update to Star Wars: Jedi Challenges now anyone can play it! It uses augmented reality to project the holographic pieces to your own table (or really, anywhere you want). And it only took 41 years from the first movie to create. (LINK)

Alexa Blueprints: Amazon has released a new feature that lets anyone make custom skills without knowing any code. These “blueprints” act as templates for making questions, responses, trivia games, narrative stories, and other skills with customizable answers unique to each user. We know what we’ll be doing this weekend! (LINK)

Finstagram: Life is never as good as it looks on social media. So now teens who are tired of the “success theater” of Instagram are creating a secondary account, known as a “Finstagram,” to express themselves privately – no makeup or dirty dishes in the sink (GASP). We really enjoyed this Art19 podcast featuring insights from young people and model Paris Sanders talking about this cultural reaction to traditional social media. (LINK)

Millennials May Have Improved English: There are LOTS of memes about all the things Millennials have ruined… but it turns out that their disregard for traditional grammar may have improved written English. A researcher from the University of Manchester says the use of deliberately misspelled words or misused grammar can convey tone, nuance, humor, EVEN ANNOYANCE with atypical capitalization, ellipsis, or a complete lack of punctuation. For example, using a period (a.k.a. a full stop) at the end of a sentence “indicates that you are cross.” kthxbai (LINK)

Snap adds Group Video Calls: This week Snapchat introduced a new group video chat feature, letting users chat with up to 16 of their closest friends via video. Or up to 32 via audio! Just tap the video icon in a group chat to get started, or start up a call with a few people and invite new friends to join. And yes, the lenses work with all 16 people. (LINK)

Amazon’s ‘Voice Sniffer Algorithm’: Don’t panic yet, but new patent filings show Amazon is looking to use their Echo smart speaker to not only listen once you say “Alexa,” but to be always listening and analyzing what’s being said. Called the voice sniffer algorithm, the idea is to better understand users and their personalities. For example, it could hear words like “prefer” and “bought” or “hate” or “disliked,” and then use that to judge interest levels in various products. We’ll be watching this closely to see if the public has any appetite for this kind of always-on listening in their homes.  (LINK)

Memes of the Week: The Monterey Bay Aquarium took the American Chopper Argument Meme to the next level today. And Mason Ramsey, the 10-year-old who’s been dubbed “Walmart boy” and “Walmart kid,” broke the internet this week with his cowboy getup and yodeling skills. And the internet did what it does – remixes!! Please enjoy these with your coworkers at full volume: Remix 1, Remix 2, Remix 3, Remix 4, Remix 5, and Bonus 1 Hour Remix Version

YouTube Testing New Virtual Background Options: Google is using its neural network to improve the ability to recognize hair, faces, glasses and shoulders, which is helping a beta group of YouTube Stories users swap out their background images with nothing more than a phone. It’s called the “video segmentation tool” and gives us a glimpse of real-time production that will be coming to social media in the near future. Want to send that selfie video from the beach? Simply click the beach background option – no special greenscreen or post-processing required. (LINK)

Déjà Vu for your Déjà Vu: Sometimes we all get that feeling that we’ve experienced this all before. And that you know what will happen next. Except new research looked into the feeling of premonition that often accompanies déjà vu, using lab experiments that tried to induce the sensation and tracked whether subjects really did know what would come next. As it turns out, déjà vu didn’t seem to bestow the ability to predict the future. But you already knew that, right? (LINK)

More Augmented Reality Innovation: Last week we shared news about Ghostbusters AR and Harry Potter: Wizards Uniteare launching soon. This week Jurassic World Alive was announced, following the same formula as Pokemon Go, where players will walk around the physical world collecting and interacting with characters. This week Nickelodeon announced adding AR features to its Sky Whale mobile game and a new AR game, Do Not Touch. In other AR news this week, a collective of eight internet artists transformed the Jackson Pollock room in the New York City Museum of Modern Art into their own augmented reality gallery — without the museum’s permission. At this pace, Augmented Reality is shaping up to be one of the mainstream tech breakouts of 2018.

7 Twitter users are suing President Trump for blocking them:After being blocked from the @realDonaldTrump account, Twitter users are suing the President in a case that will test how courts apply the First Amendment to the social media accounts of public officials, whether such accounts constitute a “public forum” or whether public officials should be able to block constituents or critics. U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald suggested that the case should be settled and that Trump should mute rather than block his followers. As we consider the wider impacts of social media post-Trump, this will be a fascinating case to watch.  (LINK)

Ramen Fork is Here! The company that invented ramen rolled out a new device that gets rid of your slurping noises. The smart fork connects to an app and plays a noise that sounds like a toilet flushing. FINALLY.

Did Kylie Jenner’s Tweet Cost Snapchat $1.3 Billion? Snapchat’s user-experience has always been a mess, but this latest update spurned more than a million people to sign a Change.org petition to reverse the update. But nobody saw this coming: Reality star Kylie Jenner — Snapchat’s most viewed user by a longshot —  tweeted that she doesn’t open the app anymore. And the following day Snap’s shares dropped by as much as 7.2% ($1.3 BILLION LOSS). Whether directly tied to her tweet or the overall decline in active users, Snap is certainly feeling the heat of an influencer scorned today. (LINK)

The Legal Case Against Archiving Video Games in Museums: Whether you grew up on Bubble Bobble, Super Mario or Wolfenstein, there’s a nostalgic place in our collective history for our first video game experiences and being able to re-play them decades later. As technology evolves and the sheer amount of games increase exponentially, there is disagreement about how to preserve old online games. The Entertainment Software Association (including Electronic Arts, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo) is petitioning the US Copyright Office to not make DMCA exemptions for abandoned online multiplayer games. They are afraid video game museums will emerge as competitors! We’re not confident their objection will pass, however, which means we’ll most likely see World of Warcraft, Dota 2 and even Angry Birds Classic preserved in museums for centuries to come. Score! (LINK)

#SideProfileSelfies: This week #SideProfileSelfies went viral thanks to one woman on a mission to change the way people look at themselves by breaking down “one of the last beauty taboos” — the nose. Radhika Sanghani hates her nose and the lack of larger-nosed ladies with stereotypically ‘hot’ roles in movies or ad campaigns, tweeting “Let’s stop hating our noses for not being tiny, little snubs and learn to love them by sharing a #sideprofileselfie.” The result has been a news cycle on the more positive side of “selfitis,” which had its own news cycle this week about the obsessive taking of selfies. After all, selfies are nothing to sniff at. (LINK)

Listening to Metal Music is Good for Your Health: A new study published in the Journal of Community Psychology showed that metal music is good for your brain, your emotional health and can be a positive outlet for people ages 18-24 who may spend some quality time in the mosh pit. “Despite experiences of intense family situations, ostracism, bullying and loneliness, these participants all got through this period of life with little or no explicit mental health issues.” Another study from Humboldt State University found that metalheads generally lived happier lives than non-metal music listeners. So crank up some Slayer and Metallica this weekend and let it all out. For your health. (LINK)

Kids Meet a 101-Year-Old: In more wholesome social news this week, the latest edition of HiHo’s “Kids Meet” series features a group of curious kids interviewing a friendly centenarian woman named Alice. She talks about the days before radio and cars, listens attentively to the kids, and pretty much makes you want to call your Grandma and remind her how much you love her. If you dig this, check out Kids Meet a Guide Dog for the Blind. (LINK)