Your guide to text-based emoticons, as explained by goofy photos of LOLcats. Originally spotted at pop-culture journal YesButNoButYes.com.

Below are simple links to other interesting stuff I've come across on the web in the last day or two; they may or may not concern literature or photography, or indeed the arts at all. You can click here to learn more about how I compile this list and what software I use, if you're interested.

AV Club: "Raimi's 'Drag Me To Hell' is actually 'Evil Dead 4'"
This is interesting: In a review of the movie today, the Onion AV Club's Scott Tobias argues that Sam Raimi's new movie, "Drag Me To Hell," far from being the cheesy dramatic J-Horror ripoff the commercials make it seem, is actually a rollicking and gleefully over-the-top comedy, and in fact it could be strongly argued that in actuality it's the fourth installment of Raimi's legendary "Evil Dead" series, only without the words "Evil Dead" actually in the title. What a shame that the marketing dipsh-ts at Universal decided not to mention a single bit of any of this in any of the film's promotional material.

Daily Beast confirms: Suppressed torture photos show US soldiers raping prisoners
Tina Brown's "The Daily Beast" is confirming through anonymous sources what was reported in the London Daily Telegraph yesterday: that the hundreds of new torture photos President Obama is currently suppressing from being made public include dozens of images of American soldiers literally sexually raping prisoners -- including such harrowing shots as Muslim men being forced to masturbate while being f-cked in the ass by US military personnel. J-sus, no wonder Obama is doing everything humanly possible to keep these photos from being released to the public; there's going to be rioting in the godd-mn STREETS when they finally do.

The Ottoman Republic? Turkey starts embracing the East again
For Americans who don't know, what is currently known as Turkey used to be the heart of the old Ottoman Empire, which for centuries was known as the cultural and political gateway between Western civilization and Eastern; but after its breakup during World War One, modern Turkey has been thoroughly pro-West, to the point that it will likely be the first Muslim state to join the EU, probably in the next decade. But in this fascinating article by the always great GlobalPost.com, it's argued that Turkey is returning to its roots as a cultural bridge, sending new emissaries recently throughout the Middle East and Russia, and doubling trade in the last three years with Syria, Iran and Iraq. It's a political strategy being called "Neo-Ottomanism" more and more; read the entire article for all the interesting details.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Google Wave
As a follow-up to the previous link, here is TechCrunch's detailed guide to Google's ambitious, world-changing new app called "Wave," which is hard to describe without just looking at it in action: imagine combining email, IM and web apps into a single drag-and-drop interface, then adding Facebook's ability to update in real time and to selectively add information wherever on the page you want, THEN adding the ability to export the entire thing into an embeddable webpage window if you want, AND letting visitors to that webpage add to the collaboration if they want as well. I know, it's confusing; just check out this article. By the way, this is based on the coming HTML 5 standard, which for the first time in history every single browser company (besides Microsoft, of course) has agreed to 100-percent adhere to when developing their newest versions. Yeah, of COURSE Microsoft is the last company on the planet who refuses to comply with global tech web standards! Of COURSE they are!

Google spanks Microsoft on 'Bing Day'
Yesterday was supposed to be the day that Microsoft unveiled its hot new search engine, called "Bing" (which for those who haven't seen the screenshots, is basically Google Search but with a bunch of extra crap and pretty pictures added); but surprise surprise, Bing wasn't actually ready on launch day, leading to a rather subdued rollout announcement among a small room of corporate executives by Steve Ballmer. Meanwhile, just minutes after that started, Google publicly announced its grand new society-changing project called "Wave" to a room of four thousand engineers, which really is as profound as the hype makes it seem: imagine combining email, IM, Facebook "walls," and all web apps in existence into one giant drag-and-drop interface, then making the whole thing open source, and you'll start getting just an IDEA of what Wave can do. Can Microsoft literally not do a single thing right anymore? Has the incompetence there really reached such an all-pervasive level?