TLDR

The Slender Man is the internet's monster - the subject of countless remixes, tributes, and parodies. He's so ubiquitous he feels like he's been around for ages, like folklore. But Slender Man has an owner and a point of origin. Alex talks to Eric Knudsen, the creator of Slender Man.

YouTube's infamous for having one of the worst comment sections on the internet. There's no reason to ever read them. Unless you’re writer & filmmaker Mark Slutsky. Mark spends hours scouring the comments section on YouTube, and occasionally, scattered in the dross, he finds small poignant stories for his site Sad Youtube.

This episode of TLDR contains some explicit language.

On September 11th, 2012, gunmen attacked two American compounds in Benghazi, Libya, killing four Americans. Sean Smith, one of the four killed in the attack, was an IT manager in the real world, but online, he was Vile Rat, a hugely influential diplomat in the video game Eve Online. Alex talks to Sean's friend Alex "The Mittani" Gianturco about who Sean was both in Eve and in the real world.

One way to make money making music online is the boring way. Write one song that does incredibly well and live off the royalties for the rest of your life.

Matt Farley is a musician who’s gone a different route. He's written over 14,000 songs and he makes a tiny bit of money each time someone plays one on Spotify or iTunes. PJ visited Matt at his home recording studio to see how it all works.

Marion Stokes was a hoarder. When she died last year, her family had to figure out what to do with 9 separate residences and 3 storage locations full of stuff - everything from tens of thousands of books to decades-old Apple computers. This is the story of how they found a home for the strangest artifact in her collection — 140,000 videocassettes filled with 35 years of round-the-clock cable TV news.

This episode of TLDR contains some explicit language.

This has been a crazy season for internet hoaxes. This week, we investigate one we actually deeply enjoyed being fooled by -- about a social media bot for Pace Picante Salsa going insane and inadvertently revealing an entire world of corporate conspiracy. We talk to the comedian behind the hoax, Randy Liedtke, who has his own very funny podcast called The Bone Zone.

Hello! We are taking a week off the podcast to work on some special things that you will like a lot. This episode is a Best Of*, in case you have a friend who hasn't gotten a chance to check us out who you might like to share TLDR with. It also includes an answer to one of our show's enduring mysteries - just what the hell TLDR stands for.

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This week on New Tech City, we're crossing the digital divide. 

Lulu is an app that lets women rate guys they've slept with. Was he willing to commit? Was he gassy? The ratings are anonymous, and men can't see their profiles.

Before the Internet as we know it today, there were text-based bulletin board systems all over the country that people could dial into. One of those systems, M-net, happened to live in Alex's backyard, and it was his internet home base for the better part of a decade. Alex went back this week and found out that it's actually still running.