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Why your girlfriend is interchangeable with your MacBook Pro.

Spotted at the Bulgarian Design Biennial: The HUG armchair by furniture and industrial designer Ilian Milinov. (Thanks, camera battery, for dying and forcing us to resort to the crappy cell phone camera.)

The designer’s inspiration comes from the simple gestures in human relationships, like hugging your loved one, and even accounts for the intimacy deprivation of a long-distance relationship: The organic HUG silhouette makes room for a laptop when your loved one is away, for those late-night videochats that keep the relationship alive.

Gotta love the simple brilliance of its form/function hybrid — the intimacy of a loveseat sans the girlfriend-induced leg umbness, plus the comfort of a laptop lounge setup, sans the overheated quads. We want one.

What peer pressure has to do with revolutionizing social media monetization.

THIS JUST IN

YouTube just announced its first move into retail land: click-to-buy links in music videos. Like most Google initiatives, the move is informed by pure organic consumer demand — Google folks noticed that the comment area below vides is fertile ground for consumer discussion of the music used in a video, so they jumped on the opportunity with an e-commerce platform that provides the answer in a direct click-to-buy format.

Currently available to U.S. users only, the platform links to iTunes and Amazon downloads from the EMI Music catalog, but is said to eventually expand into other media like TV, film and print.

We, of course, are not surprised — if it were any other company, Google would be doing this mainly as a reaction to the monetize-YouTube-already peer pressure, but because it’s Google, we know that no action is ever a reaction. There are greater forces at play, and we’re here to tug at their toys.

>>> More at the Official Google Blog

How to nail the I-don’t-give-a-fuck look by actually not giving a fuck but hopefully getting one.

TRICK OR TRITE

Halloween, that special time when people who should not be roaming the streets half-naked get to roam the streets half-naked, is almost upon us. And if you’re employed by any part of the creative industry and/or consider yourself a “hipster” (despite never admitting to it), so is that tortuous hunt for the right costume. You know, the one that lets you out-hip, out-snark, and out-I’m-too-cool-to-care-about-this-kind-of-stuff everyone else. The one from the comfort of which you can make fun of all the vixens, sluts, bachelors, pimps, and other oh-so-cheesy get-ups out there. The one that inevitably turns out to be much less funny/original/culturally-relevant than you thought.

Well, this year we’re doing a full 180 and refusing to let this whole fuss consume a good two weeks of our lives. So, we’re getting a marginally-out-of-the-box costume that comes in a box. Yep, we’re Amazoning it. Because, seriously, it’s a Catch-22: If you end up on the “most original” list, you’re inevitably slammed with the “trying too hard” stamp. And if you don’t, well, you’re just unoriginal.

So join us in screwing with the system by boxing it all with a few click-ship picks that are sure to set you apart from the cheeseballs and the try-hards by being, well, neither. If only so you can make fun of all your friends who did spend those obsessive two weeks on their costumes.

If you’re hitched, how about the Plug & Socket set? Nothing says “we have great geek sex and like to rub it in your face in a way you can’t exactly call us out on” better. Or, if you’re on the not-wanting-to-look-desperate-so-broadcasting-desperation-hoping-it-would-appear-snarky side, just don the One Night Stand costume — sure, you’ll go home alone again, but at least you won’t wake up next to one of those much-less-attractive-in-the-morning French maids, vixens or naughty nurses.

And although it’s so 2007, we’re yet to have someone take us up on our Borat mankini dare. Plus, nothing says “I’m too cool to care about impressing people with my time-relevant wit” like a has-been costume that your rock out with your… oh, never mind.