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This week, the internet's collective chortling at a particularly yonic stadium for Qatar's World Cup may have actually doomed the project to abandonment. But it's hardly the first—or most overt—anatomical architecture in recent years. In fact, it's just the latest in a centuries-spanning tradition.

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Surely one of the best parts of the holiday season (heck, of the whole year) is the white elephant office gift exchange — if for no other reason than watching your colleagues struggle to come up with ideas that don't involve socks or gift cards. Even if your office doesn't participate in such an exchange, you're likely attending some kind of holiday party or function for work this year — and you won't want to show up empty-handed

Exchanging gifts with coworkers can be tricky. After all, you spend a crazy amount of time with these people — but what do you really know about them? Unless you're close with your coworkers outside of the workplace, it's always better to stay on the safe side when it comes to gift-giving. And there's nothing safer than quirky, funny or useful office decor Read more...

This is just hard to believe. (The Big J #FTW.) SPEAKERS UP!

From Leah C.: “Who wouldn’t be charmed by a caterpillar that squeaks when you goose its tiny hiney?”

The next-generation gaming frenzy is in full swing as we sit between two major console launches: the PlayStation 4, which launched last Friday, and the Xbox One, coming out this Friday.

We put them side by side to help you decide which one to pick up this holiday season. In the infographic below, we get up close and personal with their hardware specs and peripherals, letting you see everything.

No matter which console you favor, all can definitely agree that gaming never looked sleeker.

Image: Mashable, Nina Frazier. Mashable Infographic. Font: Ballpark Weiner Read more...

A bus driver in China crashed into a truck recently while he was checking a text message and looking away from the road. How do I know? The whole thing was caught on video.

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G-G the book - G-G on Facebook - G-G on Twitter

Looking back at the Atari 2600, it really wasn’t very good until Activision came along and raised the bar for graphics and sound for the early 8-bit console. To commemorate these classic games, Chicago Toy Collector Dan Polydoris created this nifty set of custom action figures.

The set of five action figures got their start as various G.I. Joe characters, but they’re now sporting that perfect Activision 8-bit look. While Pitfall Harry is surely the most recognizable of the bunch, the other games were all pretty solid too – especially H.E.R.O. - though I never knew its protagonist’s name was Roderick.

Awesome job, Dan. These are all quite special. I only wish you would make a little burglar dude for Kaboom!

[via it8bit]

Quartz has dug up a rather sad chart that reveals the racial preferences of online daters. Judging from data from Facebook dating app Are You Interested, you can see how different races respond to each other under the veil of the Internet. Most women respond positively to white men, while most men respond positively to Asian women. On the flip side, most women and all men have the lowest response rates when it comes to black men and women.

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Our comprehensive reviews of the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One from the last week total more than 10,000 words combined. Add in coverage of various games, developer thoughts on the features of both systems, and various bits of news, opinion, and historical analysis, and that's probably 10,000 more words about these newcomers in the last month alone... and that doesn't even get into the pre-launch coverage we've been running since Sony officially kicked things off in February.

All that should hopefully satisfy people who want a comprehensive take on what both systems bring to the table. But other would-be gamers may just want a quick, comparative take on which console they should get. If that's you, you're in luck—we've summarized the competing features and attractions of both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in a relatively concise (but still detailed) format.

Hardware

A shiny black finish is the new wood paneling.

Judged purely as a black box, the PS4 is the clear winner. The system is significantly smaller than the Xbox One and about three pounds lighter, which is nice if you care about taking it out of your entertainment center to travel with it. The PS4 just plain looks better, too, with striking angles and a front ridge that elegantly hides ports and the disc slot. It's a huge improvement over the industrial boxiness of the Xbox One.

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When the Xbox 360 launched in 2005, the hardware was plagued with a bunch of console crippling issues, one of which being the famous Red Ring of Death, an LED indication that your game machine is now a giant brick.  Some estimates put the failure rate of the 360 as high as 54%.  Whatever the actual number was, it was so bad that Microsoft ex

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This post is not about the day to day operations of The Old Reader or anything of that nature.  It’s about how our team came to get involved with RSS and how we see the future of this application and technology that we value so highly.

As a long time user of RSS and Google Reader, I’ve long appreciated the benefits of the technology.  Like many people, my use of Google Reader faded a bit as social media platforms took hold.  But, I’d always go back to Google Reader when I wanted to cut through the noise of social networks and focus on things I’m really passionate about.  Google Reader wasn’t my “second screen” application where I’d go to take a break from work.  It filled a much more essential need for me by providing these three features:

1.  Unread items are kept in a queue.  I don’t miss things.  No algorithm chooses what to show me or not show me.

2.  It’s an archive of blogs that I value and posts that I’ve read.

3.  I can follow whatever I want from anywhere on the web.  It embodies the open web.

For my professional career in web research and development, I can’t really live without these features.  I can follow twitter feeds or like Facebook pages, but I’m certain to miss important content from people who I highly value.  I need those items queued, archived, and I need to be able to subscribe to anybody on the entire open web.  I can’t be limited to those authors who choose to enter into private social networks and I don’t want to have to constantly check my accounts for updates.

So this leads me to how we got involved in The Old Reader.  When Google Reader shut it’s doors, my business partner Jim did some research and tried several services and suggested I’d like The Old Reader the best.  So we both moved on over.  I read some articles trying to understand why Google Reader would shut down and one really stuck with me.  It hypothesized that Google had been following the lead of companies like Facebook and Twitter by turning their backs on the open web and trying to build their own private/closed social networks.  It’s frankly hard to argue against this theory.

However, we see this trend of migrating from the open web to private networks as cyclical.  How long will it be before your Facebook stream is so full of promoted content, bizarre algorithmic decisions, and tracking cookie based shopping cart reminders that you won’t be getting any valuable information?  For as little as $60, a business can promote a page to Facebook users.  It won’t be long before your news feed is worthless.  So we jumped at the opportunity to get involved with developing and managing The Old Reader.  We believe in it.

As we’ve been looking to grow our engineering team at Levee Labs and The Old Reader we’ve met with a number of bright young people that are surprisingly unaware of RSS.  They say “I recognize the RSS icon, but haven’t really ever used it.”  Is it possible that there is a lost generation of internet users that are completely unfamiliar with RSS?  Are they unfamiliar with the idea of the open web too?  We believe that’s the case and we’ve been working hard to come up with ideas that’ll expose that generation to RSS, The Old Reader, and the open web.  It’s what made the internet great to begin with and it’s coming back.

Thanks for using The Old Reader!