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Cold, Logical, Precise, and Cursed
There are two kinds of things: games, and not games.
Elon Musk buying Twitter scrambled the media ecosystem so badly that we have McSweeney’s covering breaking news and Bloomberg doing a tweets roundup. Also in Bloomberg, Kurt Wagner and Edward Ludlow reported that Twitter froze product updates “to keep employees who may be miffed about the deal from ‘going rogue,’” which Mike Isaac thinks is probably overstated, and I agree. Software is cold, logical, precise, and cursed so it only makes sense to pause deploys when there’s a lot of attention on your company or on Friday or when the moon is doing a thing. That’s just normal ops best practices. Bloomberg’s Tom Maloney investigated where the $21 billion that Musk personally guaranteed will come from, and the answer is basically Nich Carlson’s: “Fun question! I’d rather not say publicly for lots of practical reasons I’m sure you can imagine.” The news also startled a few stinky toots out of Dragon Lord Jeff Bezos, including some light conspiracizing about China and an approving retweet of Glem Grøenweld praising that Vanity Fair garbage I roasted here last week, as if to remind us that he sucks too. We could never forget, Jeff! You’ll always be the worst.
In a classic Platformer Casey reported what was going on in the Twitter company Slack: “One thread, in which an employee asked good-naturedly whether anyone was excited about the prospect of working for Musk, drew dozens of responses, many of them quite ugly.” Lol. “Alright Elon, don’t fuck it up,” wrote Alex Wilhelm, expressing a let’s say idiosyncratic view of how Twitter’s been doing so far, and Nick Heer compared this to Facebook buying Instagram, or “The Last Time an Unlikeable Buyer Took Over a Likeable Social Network.” “Likeable” is also a pretty idiosyncratic adjective for a social network commonly called “the hellsite.” Recode’s Peter Kafka considered the ways Musk could make Twitter worth the $44 billion he’s paying for it, and while step one is clearly “steal underwear,” step two still looks hazy. And Liz Lopatto (who has returned to reporting, in case you thought there was no good news today) checked in on Calico Jack Dorsey: “You know what, I’m into it. Let’s go full, unkempt beard for this one. The Gen-Xers are online and they are posting Radiohead on main.” The other bit of good news is that all this is crashing Trump’s fake-Twitter-clone SPAC, which is “down 44% since Elon Musk disclosed [his] Twitter stake.”
Today in Games:
There’s a new Zach Gage game called Knotwords:
“There’s this kind of weird thing with crosswords, which is that if you talk to crossword players about crosswords, it’s all about the clues and the structure of the clueing,” Gage says. “But the thing is, the actual grid of letters is incredibly complicated… but as a player, it’s like this little side effect that you’re not even focusing on.”
Today is also Wordle number 311, so make sure you come original.
Today in Things That Are Not Games:
In Maclean’s Eva Holland wrote about a support group for outdoor adventurers and first responders dealing with trauma:
They call themselves Mountain Muskox, referencing the shaggy Arctic herd animals that protect themselves by forming a tight defensive circle… Mixing weekend warriors with some of Canada’s most accomplished mountaineers and climbers, the group is tearing down the silence that has traditionally shrouded trauma in outdoor sports.
Lizzie Plaugic and the good Atlantic Kaitlyn,1 Kaitlyn Tiffany, got high and ate ersatz Rochester garbage plates on 4/20:
I’m always wondering if basic facts of my personality and body might turn out to be figments of my imagination and therefore possible to randomly alter. If I tried weed just one more time, with Lizzie, on a holiday, would I love it?
The answer is no, but getting there is very funny. And today in boats, a P&O ferry off the Irish coast is the opposite of stuck—adrift and “not under command.”
The Wall St. Jorts. “Three SIMs? Ah, Прошу, I thought you said The Sims 3.” And how did the whole Joe Rogan backlash end up, anyway? “The podcaster says his recent headlines gained him 2 million new Spotify listeners.” Ah. Well. Nevertheless.
Today’s Song: Phương Tâm, “Có Nhớ Đêm Nào” (via ”Phương Tâm, Sixties Star of Vietnam Surf Rock, Reclaims Her Legacy at 77”)
~ during the saddest and most troublesome times of my life, there was only one set of tabs ~
I just remembered that Bezos only paid $250 million for the Washington Post, lol. Today in Tabs is registered at the post office as “meme based writing.” I am: @fka_tabs. You are: very cool. 😎
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