Death Con 3

Will I understand it if I didn't see Death Con 1 or 2?

October 10th, 2022

“Is Wall Street too woke?” might sound like a deranged question to you, because it is. But to the rich grifters building our fascist future inside the Peter Thiel / Palantir / Texas Republican Party bubble it’s self-evidently the case, report Rachel Louise Ensign, Peter Rudegeair, and AnnaMaria Andriotis at antifa rag The Wall Street Journal in a delightful #longread about GOP nepo-baby Toby Neugebauer and “Hang” Mike Pence’s former chief of staff Nick Ayers’s boozy, incompetent attempt to start an “anti-woke bank,” whatever that is.

Within months, the investors’ money was nearly gone, and GloriFi was on the verge of bankruptcy. It missed launch dates, blaming faulty technology and failures by vendors, and laid off dozens of employees. It stumbled with products; for instance, a plan to make a credit card out of the same material used for shell casings failed when the company realized the material could interfere with security chips and potentially be too thick for payment terminals, according to people familiar with the matter.

The whole clown car of Trump-era Republican charlatans is here: Greg Abbott, Ted Cruz, Kelly Loeffler, Candace Owens, as well as sex on a Zoom meeting and a drunken altercation at P.F. Chang’s. To me, that's preposterous.

Candace Owens also showed up with FKA Kanye West in matching white supremacist t-shirts in Paris last week, and Ye’s week continued as it began, with two long nights of uninterrupted gibberish on Uncle Tucker’s Constipated-Face The Nation and an Instagram ban that cascaded into a Twitter ban when Kanye promised to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” setting a new bar for threats that are both “widely considered to be allegedly purportedly criticized as antisemitically-charged” and also incoherent. If you want to know more about social media moderation vis-a-vis Mr. West’s perceptible Lexapro shortage (and you probably don’t) Garbage Ryan at least related it to a big dumpy frog, somehow.

Is there any good news? Yes! The universe is not locally real. “This is, of course, deeply contrary to our everyday experiences,” claims Daniel Garisto in Scientific American, incorrectly.

The metaverse is neither locally nor globally real. In fact Coindesk’s Cameron Thompson reports that it barely exists at all:

According to data from DappRadar, the Ethereum-based virtual world Decentraland had 38 active users in the past 24 hours, while competitor The Sandbox boasted 522 active users in that same time.

Alex Heath reported that even its developers at Meta aren’t using Zuck’s folly Horizon Worlds, and yesterday in the Times Ryan Mac, Sheera Frenkel and Kevin Roose reported on how that whole metaverse pivot is going for Facebook (which is: bad). Putting Ryan Mac and Kevin Roose together to report on Facebook sure does produce a story with a weird tone of, like, cheerful yearning revulsion. So who is using the metaverse? Apparently Kashmir Hill and a lot of very young children who stole their parents disused headsets. Hill concludes that:

Putting on the headset was annoying, but once I started chatting in Horizon, I had a good time and was reluctant to leave. I liked meeting people spontaneously without the increasingly heavy-handed algorithmic intervention of traditional social media platforms.

…but every minute of her twenty four hours in the metaverse sounds objectively dreadful. Anyway, real people don’t care about the metaverse. They care about the Dunkin’ rewards program.

Last week, bankrupt crypto bank Celsius made a court filing that “seems to have the names and recent transactions of every user on the platform,” reported Matt Novak. The document was over 14,500 pages, which is 26,132 pages Fahrenheit, and of course someone already made a handy query tool for it at celsiusnetworth.com. Also in crypto: Binance got hacked (again).

The Only Good Crypto-Adjacent Thing: continues to be the Dirt newsletter, where you can ignore the NFT and DAO stuff completely and just read Emily Jensen about Jeremy Fragrance. His walk with Christ has never been stronger.

++++ FLASH ++++ Breaking News ++++ Fat Bear Scandal ++++ FLASH ++++

Today in Floating Point Math: https://0.30000000000000004.com/

Today in Crudité: Rebecca Traister on John Fetterman. 

Worst Pit Since DashCon: “…streamer Adriana Chechik tweeted that she broke her back in two places when she jumped off the exhibit’s platform and into the foam cubes” of TwitchCon’s concrete-floored Spinal Foam Pit.

Today’s Song: Sleigh Bells, “Crown on the Ground”

~ a drowning man is not troubled by tabs ~

BIG T-SHIRT SALE: FREE (ish) SHIPPING on all Large, XL, and 2XL “You Can Always Quit” shirts. North American shipping is free, and everywhere else is just $6.00. Wow! I am definitely not going to regret this.

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