This, to me, is just a perfect piece of software. Alien Blue is for Reddit, and it shows a simple list of stories on the left, and whatever content you’ve tapped on to the right. It’s like browsing in something like Windows Explorer or Mac’s Finder, but with little flourishes and gestures that make cruising hundreds of posts a breeze. Frequent updates — and a very friendly developer — have kept this app docked on my iPhone and iPad for the past three years.

This was easily my most frivolous purchase, as the third-generation iPad I bought last year worked just fine. But for something I’m often schlepping around in my bag or holding for long periods of time, weight is everything, and this is nearly half a pound lighter. I originally bought the Retina display-equipped version of the Mini, but found the screen just too **all for my liking, and the weight benefit lacking when side by side with the Air. I chose the Verizon version, but I also shelled out for a T-Mobile SIM card, which gets 200MB of free data per month.

What if you did some horrible and amazing things, then decided to reflect on them — and yourself — by interviewing some of your closest family, friends, and maybe even enemies? New York Times journalist David Carr did just that in this autobiography, which is a gripping collection of recollecti*** from him and others about drug use, journali**, and personal relati***hips.

My favorite art form is photography, but Sweden’s Anders Zorn recently made me rethink that. A collection of some 100 of his paintings and etchings, shown off at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum, traverse Zorn’s storied career not only as a portrait artist, but also a guy who could capture candid, honest moments with nothing more than a paintbrush. His best trick? Water. While much of the detail in his work was found in faces and people’s clothing, his watercolors captured the chaos and complexity of something as simple as a pond.

The internet is full of dark and disturbing things, including this GIF of an ice cream person happily eating its own head. It’s actually from a made-to-be-viral (and creepy) advertisement by Philadelphia-based ice cream company Little Baby’s Ice Cream. I keep this GIF on speed dial to send to someone when they’ve said something that makes no sense.