Unfortunately the bad news continued this week, and we’ve covered some of it for you here. But keep reading, we promise we’ll lighten your mood by the end of this article.

A giant falls

For anyone who remembers the 1995 Rugby World Cup, the name Jonah Lomu rings loud. How could it not. At 20-years-old and standing at 6 foot 5 inches tall, he was a giant of a man, scoring seven tries in five matches, including one memorable one against England where he ran straight over Mike Catt.

On Wednesday, 18 November, in the early hours of the morning, the unthinkable happened: Lomu passed away at the age of 40. His health problems were well-known, but it still doesn’t make up for the shock. Lomu was a rugby legend and no one can deny that.

There were many tributes on social media about the great man and they were all fitting. However, this video hit a particular nerve for us – Wesley College, the school which Lomu attended, performing the Haka in tribute.

Prepare yourselves for a few tears.

Twitter is down, call 911!

Enough with the soppy stuff now. And what better way to lift the mood than to talk about when Twitter was down.

When Twitter goes down – for whatever reason – people seem to lose their minds a little. Is it because it means they now have to speak to people in person, using longer sentences? Or is it more due to withdrawal symptoms from a lack of cat memes? Maybe it’s a coincidence that Twitter goes down on the day the majority of the population forgot to take their cuckoo meds.

Whatever the reason, the fact remains that when Twitter goes down, people get upset.

Earlier this week, Twitter experienced some downtime. As soon as the platform was back up and running, people began to tweet about it. And a trending topic ensued. Here are our favourites:

@Skhu_baby: #whenTwitterWasDown I tried to read this book: pic.twitter.com/qKt5mtS58j

@TrillestNxgga: #WhenTwitterWasDown everyone was like pic.twitter.com/u6SVS5DZiC

@Ya_a_seen_Him: #whentwitterwasdown I wrote all my tweets on post-its.

@irCadillac: #WhenTwitterWasDown I looked out the window and experienced life.

And then there were some people who didn’t even know about it until it was over. Then again, it was only down for something like five minutes. But apparently that’s like three years in Twitter time.

The 2015 Word of the Year is ...

This week, Oxford Dictionaries announced its Word of the Year for 2015. And … well, it’s not actually a word.

For the first time ever, the ‘Word of the Year’ is a pictograph.

Officially, called the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji, it beat out words on the shortlist that included such ‘doozies’ as ‘lumbersexual’ (we’re not even going to tell you what we think this is); they (yes, that’s not joke); on fleek (just like my eyebrows); and Brexit (any guesses?) to name a few.

Looking at that list, we can figure out why they chose an emoji instead. Apparently, it’s all scientific and there are sound reasons behind why certain words are chosen. But honestly, we don’t get it.

Does this mean future dictionaries will be picture books with emojis describing anything and everything?

Google+ is back, back again

And in other news, Google+ has returned. The new platform has had a top-to-tail make-over and was launched for all to see on Tuesday, 17 November.

According to the Google+ team, the refreshed platform “puts Communities and Collections front and centre”. It’s supposedly now more mobile-friendly too. Apparently, there are 1.2 million new joins per day to Google+ communities.

Uh, okay. We were under the impression that Google+ was only used by Google staff …? Perhaps we were wrong. We’re looking forward to see how this version plays out.

Until next week … remember to keep your tears of joy face on.