A Somewhat Chaotic Orbit

A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster rocket that “has been following a somewhat chaotic orbit” since 2015 (same) will crash into the moon on March 4th, or “Star Wars Day.” March the Fourth be with you! The two questions you have about this are:

1. Do I need to care? No, it’s fine, this won’t harm the moon or affect you or anyone else on earth.

2. Will it look like that scene from Georges Méliès’ 1902 special effects masterpiece “A Trip to the Moon?”Yes, it will look exactly like this:

Also today in chaotic behavior: “True Story: Dakota Johnson once locked me and my Mom inside a Blue Bottle Coffee shop because the barista told her she couldn’t make the coffee herself,” tweeted @biz_socks earlier this week. Is this true, or just another bowl of limes? Fortunately for us all, Rebecca Alter reported it out for Vulture.

“‘Calendly’ Etiquette is The Most Raw / Naked Display of Social Capital Dynamics in Business” writes the profoundly insecure venture capitalist and professional Ex-Facebook Guy Sam Lessin, who co-founded a company that appears to make surveillance tools to monitor low-wage support workers. Fellas, is it gay to touch another dude’s calendar? This kicked off a whole Calendly Discourse on Twitter, which I wrote about at length in frosting on a giant chocolate chip cookie that I subsequently ate. It was both insightful and delicious.

Yesterday O.R.P. Substack sent a non mea culpa email out of the blue, transparently trying to get ahead of some bad news by explaining at moderate length and characteristic self-righteousness that profiting from a lot of harmful garbage content is good, actually. Sure enough today The Guardian’s Dan Milmo reports that:

Substack spokesperson Lulu Cheng Meservey posted a thread claiming that “We understand principles come at a cost.” Substack’s 10% share of those anti-vax millions are certainly not a cost, so it’s unclear what she’s referring to. The cost in lives lost to Covid maybe? Anyway, feel free to try to make sense of this:

Spotify also sided with the anti-vax movement, choosing to keep Joe Rogan instead of Neil Young. Casey Newton wrote about these two similar platform struggles yesterday, identifying Spotify’s policy enforcement as financially biased and Substack’s as principled, which I think is a rare miss for Platformer, given the arbitrary content Substack does ban (like porn) and the policy against harassment on the basis of gender identity it has long chosen not to enforce. But maybe the platforms are just making the popular choice here since, as Tom Scocca writes in Indignity:

“But over the past year, 15 of the site’s employees have left — a nearly 100 percent turnover since April, when it had 16 full-time staffers.” Tarpley Hitt found out “What Happened at The Root?” G/O Media is what happened, as usual, but it’s a well reported story. Eliza Levinson on Netflix’s “Hype House:” “…the crumbling dynamics of a group of child TikTok influencers desperately clinging to relevance.” Yashar Ali is (almost) back. Tabletop role playing GMs: Do you need some good fake company names? Try Namers.com.

Today’s Song: Neil Young with Crazy Horse, “Down by the River”

~ You take my tab, I'll take your tab. Together we may get away. ~

Unfortunately today’s song will not appear on the Season Five Playlist because the brain geniuses at Spotify think Joe effing Rogan is more valuable than this immortal jam. Bad newsletters drive out good, everyone will get their deserts in the sweet bye and bye. If you subscribe I promise Substack only gets pennies, which they can’t even see from way up there in their own posteriors. If not, no worries, you can find me blocked on Twitter.