PINTEREST



LUV - You what I’m sick of? Using my brain. All day long it’s people and words and stress and lists and bits of paper and meetings and books that you don’t remember you’re not really into until you open them on the train home and compromise and reports and SOMETIMES I JUST WANT TO LOOK AT A PICTURE OF A DRESS.


Followed by a picture of some cupcakes.


And then a kitten.


And maybe a tray of macarons, only macarons that look as though they were photographed in the 1970s, and a neo-Nordic industrial-Georgian living room, and a bunny, and some sketches of nothing, and some inspirational haiku, and some flowers, and maybe a popular sarcastic cartoon that I don’t really get and OH LOOK AT THAT PUPPY.


I call it a Cascade of Loveliness, and sometimes a Cascade of Loveliness is the one thing that can smooth down the rough edges of my workaday world when I am feeling needled.


Sometimes I can induce a Cascade of Loveliness by going clothes shopping and touching the clothes and seeing all the different colours and blissing out in a textile-based trance. However, coming-to in a fitting room to see my bloated reflection looming yellowly out of the mirror and asking me how the hell I plan to get it out of these paisley size 2 cycling shorts somehow undoes all that good work.


What I really want is a context-free, constantly updating, infinite stream of PICTURES OF LOVELY THINGS.


Which is why Pinterest is so brilliant.


You just set up an account, follow some people, then sit back as LOVELY THINGS scroll gently down the page all calm and beautifully arranged. Handmade jewellery from Etsy. A crocheted cape. Some aged white floorboards. A cake someone made. ALL the cakes EVERYONE made. Some jeans you might like. A recipe for brioche. All this laps at your tired brain like a fragrant pink sea until you feel better. Then, if you see something you like, you can “pin” it to YOUR feed for YOUR followers, and they can feed it to THEIR followers, and so on until the internet blossoms into a spiralling pink Mandelbrot set of women sighing happily at their computers for no real reason.


Technically, Pinterest is an image-driven social bookmarking site - only instead of bookmarking protein bars you want to buy, or motivational TED talks that you think could uphance your monetivation, you’re bookmarking whoopee pie recipes and Cath Kidston aprons.


Basically, Pinterest is Del.icio.us, but for Zooey Deschanel.
- Robyn Wilder


HAT - No. Just no. Just fucking… I mean, Pinterest? No. Fucking no. I hate Pinterest. I hate everything about Pinterest. I hate how it looks. I hate how it works. I hate the word ‘Pinterest’. If you’ve signed up to Pinterest, then I hate you. In fact, the only things stopping me from coming over there and punching your jaw off for having a Pinterest account right now are a) I don’t know where you live, and b) even if I did, there’s a strong statistical likelihood that you’ve got a mural of a fucking cupcake on your living room wall.


Look, you dicks. There’s already too much social media in the world without signing up to another pile of awful, time-consuming, mimsying, pale pink, Bello Script poncery. There’s so much social media that some people actually do it for a fucking job. Imagine that. Imagine that your job basically involves going on Twitter and writing “Hey everyone, Branston Pickle still exists! Woo!” 12 times a fucking day. Imagine doing that for a living. You’d want to kill yourself, wouldn’t you? You’d want to fling yourself under anything capable of squishing your miserable torso into marmalade. When people do social media for a job, it’s a pretty good sign that there’s too much social media.


And even despite this - even despite the whirling mountain of arseishness that passes for social media - Pinterest represents the absolute pinnacle of dreadful cuntery. Because, you know, it’s just Tumblr. It’s just Tumblr in a grid. And Tumblr is already woeful enough. Look, there are already enough Instagrammed pictures of sad girls holding balloons on the internet. There are already enough bullshit sub-Hallmark quotes about believing in your potential on the internet. There are already enough sunrises and rainbows and fucking moonbeams and poxy fucking screengrabs from the ending of fucking Titanic on the internet. There are already enough impractical recipes for dreadful fucking brownies on the internet. There are already enough cats on the internet. There are too many cats on the internet. When I see a cat in real life now, I want to throw it down a well. You know whose fault that is? It’s your fucking fault, you cat-liking internet dickheads.


But, no. You had to fucking sign up to Pinterest, didn’t you? Because you needed an invite, and that made it seem exclusive. Even though all you needed to do was go on Twitter and say “Can I have a Pinterest invite?”, you still think you’re part of some brilliant rah-rah club where everyone gets as many Deepak fucking Chopra quotes as they can eat and nobody minds if you write down every single fucking passing fucking ambient thought that passes through your fucking head. But you’re not. It’s just a website. A website for bellends.


Now, MySpace? THAT’s the future.
- Stuart Heritage